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SHAW 

GEORGE versus BERNARD 



SHAW 

GEORGE versus BERNARD 



by 

J. P. HACKETT 



NEW YORK 

SHEED & WARD 

MCMXXXVII 



PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN 






TO 
HELEN 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 
PROLOGUE ...... I 

The Land of lands — the Shaws come to Ireland. 

CHAPTER I . . . . . -13 

G.B.S. — his writings — his quality as provoker — his com- 
mentators — his value — his *' mistakes " — his creed the 
key to the puzzle. 

CHAPTER n ...... 27 

Shaw's way of believing — belief about and belief in — 
belief in the Derby — Creative Evolution — the Life Force 
at work through the ages — popularity of Life Force reli- 
gions — Shaw tries to be true to the Life Force — why does 
he do it ? Who is Shaw ? 

CHAPTER in . . . . . .46 

The Kilkenny Shaws — spacious days by the Suir — 
Dublin in the 'sixties — young George Bernard in the 
midst of it — in the midst of the artists — in his home — 
in Science versus Religion — in himself — he goes to Torca 
Hill — he makes a choice — Tyndall backs him up — the 
young rationalist and Moody and Sankey. 

CHAPTER IV ...... 75 

1876, he goes to London — excitements in England and 
Europe in the 'seventies — Shaw ignores them — 1879, he 
writes a novel — he can't get a publisher — 1880, he 
writes another novel — he is still hard up — he takes to 
Samuel Butler and the life cell — he gives up rationalism 
and backs art and artists — he backs Socialism to save 
artists from starvation — the Fabian Society. 
vu 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER V . . . . . -103 

1882, he finds out that he is a communist — the New 
Politics and the New Protestantism — Karl Marx — Shaw 
studies economics and algebra — he meets Sidney Webb 
— the Fabian Society, or the New Politics in action — 
he preaches from the street corner — his quality as Art 
critic — he studies Ibsen — 1892, he finds out that he is a 
playwright. 

CHAPTER VI . . . . . 136 

His Plays — the New Protestantism in action — its slaves 
and its gods — Shaw preaches and prophesies for it — 
1902, he explodes in Man and Superman — his subsequent 
work for the Life Force and the religion of the twentieth 
century — St. Joan — difficulties of a New Protestant. 

CHAPTER VII . . . . . .167 

Free thinkers and free thinking — Spencer and Shaw, 
the amateur theologians — the biologists refuse to face 
facts — Science is partitioned — the old dogma and the 
new one — the new prophet borrows from the old faith — 
he kicks reason out the front door — he wrestles mightily 
to keep her out and let her in — the Life Force runs amuck 
in Europe — Heartbreak Bus. 

CHAPTER VIII . . . . . .196 

Shavian contradictoriness — a natural consequence of 
his creed — his way with words — Shaw's emotion-driven 
thinking — the man and the child — George and Bernard 
at odds with one another---splendid Bernard ! 



PROLOGUE 

" When I say that I am an Irishman I mean that I 
was born in Ireland, and that my native language is 
the English of Swift and not the unspeakable jargon 
of the mid-XIX century London newspapers. My 
extraction is the extraction of most Englishmen : that 
is, I have no trace in me of the commercially imported 
North Spanish strain that passes for aboriginal Irish : 
I am a genuine typical Irishman of the Danish, Norman, 
Cromwellian, and (of course) Scotch invasions." {Pre- 
faces by Bernard Shaw, p. 440.) 

Off the north-west coast of Europe lie two islands. 
One stretches out, challenging, angular and mas- 
culine, from France up into the northern seas. 
The other rests, demure, compact, feminine, turn- 
ing an impassive poll to its neighbour and a face 
full of charm and variety towards the western ocean ; 
geographically it is staged as a land of withdrawal 
and mystery, easily exploited by writing men as a 
place of haunting shadows, melancholy unfulfil- 
ment, and vague wearying dreams ; but it was not 
so from the beginning, a thousand years before 
the Celtic twilight had dawned in France and Eng- 
land the singing of the Irish poets was full of vitality 
and a sense of joy and security which triumphs 



SHAW 

over time and almost over literal translation into 
English : 

Summer has come healthy and free, 
Whence the brown wood is bent to the ground ; 
The slender nimble deer leap, 
And the path of seals is smooth. 

The cuckoo sings gentle music. 
Whence there is smooth peaceful calm ; 
Gentle birds skip upon the hill, 
And swift grey stags. 

or again : 

The lowing of heifers in summer. 
Brightest of seasons. 

Not bitter toilsome over the fertile plain, 
Delightful, smooth ! 

The voice of the wind against the branchy wood 
Upon the deep blue sky. 
Falls of the river, the note of the swan, 
Delicious music ! 

It was an attractive spot for poets and for land- 
owners. Over great plains, limestone underground 
and soft moisture-laden breezes overhead made 
pasture on which cattle fattened visibly from day to 
day ; in the broken ground in the hills the grass 
grew rich between the rocks and the sheep grew 
sleek and thick-coated ; on every hand were brim- 
ming rivers and sheltered, fish-laden lakes. To 
have ten acres of such land was to be secure, to 
have a hundred was to be important, to control 
five thousand was to be a great chief. In course of 



SHAW 

time landowners and poets combined to devise 
rules for living and fighting and passing on property. 
These rules — called the Brehon code — were different 
from those in operation in the larger island, so 
different indeed, that their reactions have bewildered 
the feudal-minded from 1 170 to this very day. 

There were many visitors to the smaller island 
even before that date. Scandinavian younger 
sons were being crowded out at home, and this 
pleasant resort of natural harbours opening on 
rich lands drew them strongly. Raids broadened 
out into invasions and, in the ninth and tenth cen- 
turies, the Danish sea-coast settlements were estab- 
lished. Later on more businesslike Norman inva- 
sions from Wales were sponsored by English kings, 
backed by feudal organisation. At first there was 
fierce opposition, with organised archery beating 
the battle-axe all along the line, but after a few 
generations more friendly feelings developed for 
very natural reasons. The Norman barons studied 
the Brehon code, and the further they moved inland 
the fainter became their feudalism. Kings were 
exacting — hard to please — uncertain ; and in this 
new country the law for chiefs with a well- 
armed following was delightful. There were other 
attractions ; the Irish girls were charming, the 
salmon fishing marvellous and the hunting 
simply magnificent. Alliances were made, inter- 
marriages were contracted, and before the Nor- 
man conquest was finished the Irishwomen had won, 

3 



SHAW 

The young de Burghs and Butlers and Fitz- 
geralds were running round in homespun kilts 
playing native games and chattering Gaelic, and 
hearing from their mothers and attendants songs 
and stories which stirred curious feelings in their 
hearts. In Dublin and its neighbourhood it was 
well understood how much the Irish girls were to 
blame for the continued failure to establish English 
law and order, and in one of the recurrent periods 
of resolute government it was resolved that " an 
Englishman marrying an Irish wife shall be half 
hanged, disembowelled alive, mutilated, a,nd forfeit 
his est ate, ^^ 

From about this time — fourteenth century — the 
land-lording business in Ireland entered on a new 
phase, in which battle-axes and sudden raids figured 
less and less, and statutes and lawyers more and 
more. Under the new rules the key phrase was, 
" he must forfeit his estate." In those days there 
were no coal mines — ^no banks — no Stock Exchange 
— no way at all by which a man could live easy 
except by owning land. In England every acre 
was ear-marked, and into Dubhn poured a steady 
stream of new English, of land-hungry governors, 
attorneys, soldiers of fortune, and men miscel- 
laneously on the make. 

There were many ways of securing the desired 
property, but by far the most effective and per- 
manent was the legal method of finding some pro- 
perty owner guilty of treason, disposing of him in 



SHAW 

prison or otherwise, and taking possession of the 
forfeited estate ; it was usually best to pick on 
one of the old English who had bagged some good 
land in the last generation. During the Wars of 
the Roses, with allegiance divided and fortunes 
varying, this method was practised in a limited 
way, but it was a century or more before it could 
be organised on a sound basis. Then, with the 
Reformation in progress, with Elizabeth on the 
warpath, with Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond, a 
Catholic, and Butler, Earl of Ormond, a Protestant, 
and with fanaticism and greed raging together, the 
new English got their chance at last. They took 
it eagerly, but the " forfeit-his-estate '* axe was now 
swinging so widely and falling so rapidly that the 
land market was glutted ; Dublin deputies and 
their friends could no longer absorb all the ter- 
ritory taken over ; even when Sir Walter Raleigh 
got 42,000 acres, Edmund Spenser 12,000, and 
others in proportion, there was still so much to 
spare that it was peddled in London at twopence 
an acre. Henceforward the marketing of Irish 
land became a serious business of state, carried on 
in a strict and orderly manner with all the weight 
of English law behind it. Governors continued to 
feather their nests in a quiet way, but the private 
enterprise stage was really over. The Plantations 
were beginning. 

The driving forces behind the great Plantation 
of Ireland — the Gromwellian Hell-or-Gonnaught 



SHAW 

Plantation — came from afar, even from Spain and 
Geneva. From 1550 onward a great flood of silver 
had poured into Cadiz, and from there into the 
currency-hungry cities of Europe as fast as Philip 
of Spain could pay for war supplies and ships. 
By 1600 the financiers, the manufacturers, and the 
traders of Western Europe had the silver and Spain 
had the memory of the Armada ; the new middle 
class was coming to the fore and getting its first 
taste of power. 

While the silver was spreading from Spain, 
something else less tangible was spreading from 
Geneva. Jean Calvin, with his genius for pre- 
cision and organisation, was forging a new creed 
and a new code, offering sanctity and certainty to 
pious Protestants dazed by Lutheran somersaults. 
It offered also two attractive by-products — self- 
righteousness and a perfectly disciplined militia — 
to the new middle class. The burgesses loved the 
new code, with its exact prescription of conduct 
and even of dress, its insistence on honesty, thrift 
and unceasing devotion to business in all waking 
hours of all working days, and its rule that savings 
must not be spent light-heartedly on fine arts, 
games and general jollification, but turned back 
into development and increased production. They 
reached out on all sides, buying and controlling 
greater and wider interests, till, in Holland and 
France, Calvinistic organisations were strong as 
Fascist States. 

6 



SHAW 

In England — bound closely to Holland in Eliza- 
beth's time — the tides of silver and Calvinism rose 
together. Royalty, on a fixed income, was desper- 
ately hard up ; between 1570 and 1648 prices 
trebled, and Charles I, facing the steepest part of 
the rise, found himself also facing the grim task 
of making ends meet by taxing the new-rich 
Puritans. They didn't like it : they were making 
money hand over fist on a rising market ; they com- 
manded the services of men and their sense of power 
was growing ; they hadn't a cent to spare for 
anything but goods . . . besides, was it not sinful 
to contribute to the support of a cavalier court 
and a state church almost popish ? 

The royal exchequer was in a parlous condition 
when some genius hit on a plan for replenishing it 
and at the same time fulfilling so many other pur- 
poses that its wizardry makes the head reel. The 
most dazzling Wall Street coups are bungling crudi- 
ties compared with this great scheme for selling 
Ireland : it promised to yield over a million 
pounds — to wipe out the King's enemies — to settle 
the Irish problem — and above all to give the rich 
merchants of the towns a promising lock-up security 
with prospects of capital appreciation, or alterna- 
tively to provide them with enough fertile Irish 
soil to make them landed gentry in a country where 
their humble forbears were unknown ; and it did 
not cost the vendors a penny. 

The plan was absolutely legal. It was called 



SHAW 

" Charles I, An. i6, Chap. XXXIII, a.d. 1640— 
An Act for the speedy and effectuall reducing of 
the Rebells in his Majestie's Kingdom of Ireland 
to their due obedience to his Majestic and the 
Crowne of England," and it provided for the sale 
of 2,500,000 acres of Irish land in small lots at 
about ten shillings an acre freehold. 

The money so raised was to be used to finance 
an armed expedition into Ireland. The General 
and officers were to be nominated and controlled 
by a committee representing the subscribers and 
members of Parliament. 

The scheme worked and the money rolled in : 

John Pim, Esq., a member of ye House ;^6oo 
Oliver Cromwell, Esq., a member of 

ye House ..... £300 

Thomas Pargiter, grocer . . . ^100 

Thomas Viner, of London, goldsmith ^^'soo 

Isaacke Jurin, of London, weaver . ;^ioo 

Richard Wade, of London, carpenter £6,100 

and so on by hundreds and thousands. But curi- 
ously enough — and this is where the New Yorker 
takes off" his hat to the Englishman — the private 
army, when equipped, instead of going to fight the 
King's enemies in Ireland, turned into an English 
rebel army, fighting Charles at Edgehill. That was 
in 1642. It was 1649 before Cromwell was able to 
dispose of the King, but the subscribers and their 
parliamentary backers had not lost sight of the main 

8 



SHAW 

issue, and immediately after the execution he was 
sent off to quell the Irish and secure the land for 
the bondholders. 

The Gromwellian invasion opened strongly at 
Drogheda, and in a short time the English Republic 
had command of all strategic points, and it only 
remained to clear the existing population from their 
farms and estates. Far more than 2,500,000 acres 
were now required, for Commonwealth funds were 
exhausted, and it had been decided to pay the 
soldiers in debentures, backed by good, rich Irish 
soil. The clearing was a problem. If the property- 
owning population had been all Irish, it would have 
been simple enough ; or even if they had been mixed 
Irish and English and all CathoHc, it would have 
been easy to devise some religious test which would 
oust them ; but they were mixed Irish-English- 
CathoHc-Protestant, and there was nothing for it 
but to hold the fortified centres and starve them off. 
So on July ist, 1651, the Commissioners of Ireland 
were found securing special supplies for the Army — 
" swords, pikes, powder horns . . . scythes, sickles, 
reaphooks, whetstones, rubstones . . . and Bibles." 
They were just in time for that year's harvest. 
The crops were cut down before they ripened, and 
by 1652 organised famine was in full swing and the 
landholders were beginning to disappear. 

But the process of starvation was too slow, and 
in 1653 the Commissioners had to try and rush 
things by making an order that all those who could 

9 



SHAW 



not secure from a court of Cromwellian judges set 
up at Athlone a decree of " Constant good affection 
to the Commonwealth " must transplant themselves 
to Connaught. This was effective — it ruled out all 
Irish and nearly all English owners — for even the 
most far-seeing Protestants had been inclined to 
back the King. 

The importation of Bibles for the army of occupa- 
tion seems curious till it becomes clear that Ireland 
was looked on as the Promised Land, and the Bible 
as a charter from heaven plus title-deeds. (Arch- 
bishop Ussher was still living ; he had fixed the 
date of Creation at 4004 b.c, and any Cromwellian 
who didn't believe that was excommunicated, i.e., 
he got no land.) The Commissioners who had been 
charged under the Act of 1640 to distribute land 
were of the elect. A record of the times (dated 
November 9th, 1653) describes them as " over- 
whelmed with a sense of their difficulties and of 
their own unworthiness for so great a service . . . 
they therefore fasted and enjoined the same thing 
on all Christian friends in Ireland, and invited the 
commanders and officers of the army to join them 
in lifting up prayers with strong crying and tears 
to Him to whom nothing is too hard, that His 
servants whom He had called forth in this day to 
act in their great transactions might be made 
faithful and carried on by His own outstretched 
arm against all opposition and difficulty to do what 
was pleasing in His sight," and later, on May 31st, 

10 



SHAW 

1654, they write : " We are somewhat in a confused 
posture yet, with our transplantation, many are 
gone but many others play ' loath to depart.' 
And many are dispensed with, as particularly one 
whole town, Cashel, towards which we had no 
great obligation upon us. But the Lord who is a 
jealous God, and more knowing of, as well as jealous 
against, their iniquity than we are, by a fire on 
23rd inst. hath burned down the whole town in a 
little more than a quarter of an hour, except some 
few houses that a few English lived in, which were 
wonderfully preserved, being in the midst of the 
town, and the houses round each burnt to the ground, 
yet they preserved." 

About the same time the officers of Dublin, 
Carlow, Wexford and Kilkenny wrote to the Lord 
Deputy — " the first purpose of transplantation is to 
prevent those of natural principles becoming one 
with these Irish as well in affinity as idolatry as 
many thousands did who came over in Queen 
Elizabeth's time, many of which have had a deep 
hand in all the late murders and massacres. And 
shall we join in affinity with the people of these 
abominations ? Would not the Lord be angry 
with us till he consumes us, having said, ' The land 
which you go to possess is an unclean land, because 
of the filthiness of the people that dwell therein. 
Ye shall not give your sons to their daughters, nor 
take their daughters to your sons,' as it is in Ezra ix. 
II, 12, 14. 'Nay, ye shall surely root them out 

II 



SHAW 

before you lest they cause you to forsake the Lord 
your God ' (Deut. vii. 23, 4, 16)." 

The officers got their way, and young WilHam 
Spenser, grandson of Edmund, and all the rest 
had to get out to Gonnaught or elsewhere to make 
room for the cavalrymen. Among them was a 
Colonel Ponsonby. 

Such was the Gromwellian invasion. While the 
officers were bargaining over their booty, young 
William Shaw was learning to ride a horse in Hamp- 
shire, practising sword-play, reading his Bible and 
otherwise preparing for his trip to Ireland. He came 
into action in 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne, 
where Ponsonby-Shaw cavalry helped to establish 
the other William on the throne of England and 
incidentally bind the Shaws and Ponsonbys in 
enduring friendship when they settled down, safe 
under the Protestant succession, in that lovely 
estate in south Kilkenny, where the soft-turfed 
lands slope down so gently to the deep-flowing 
River Suir. 



[J^ote. — The above account of the Great Planta- 
tion has been summarised from Prendergast's 
Gromwellian Settlement of Ireland, which is a careful 
account of the facts with references to all original 
documents,] 



12 



CHAPTER I 

In 1878 a young man of twenty- two, with a capital 
of sixpence invested in cheap white paper, began 
to write. By 1890 he was sending out screeches 
with his pen which were echoing through London 
and aggravating everyone. By 1900 he was pouring 
out plays of a pecuHar, intimate, effervescent 
quahty which drew large audiences and made them 
laugh in a strange, uneasy way. By 19 10 the spend- 
ing public had decided that though he was a very 
curious fellow and though no one could possibly 
agree with him about Socialism and all that, he 
must be quite respectable, because he was making 
money without being put in jail. Soon, the plain 
white paper with the fine neat writing was fluttering 
round the world — magically turning into thousands 
and thousands of crisp clean banknotes. 

To-day there is no man alive more certain of an 
audience. He has the front page of the world's 
Press freely at his disposal and he can go anywhere 
and fill a hall to the brim at a moment's notice 
with spectators and listeners, eager to see him and 
hear him mocking them and their ways of living in 
a clear, mellow, pleasant voice. He does not get 
publicity, he is publicity. Haifa century ago people 

13 



SHAW 

found him and his opinions unbearable. Thirty 
years ago earnest young men eager for the HmeHght 
tried omniscience and inconoclasm — thinking they 
were using his methods — and wondered at the lack 
of results. Just before the war his fame as a great 
jester was growing steadily, though some occa- 
sionally tried to flick him away with a phrase as 
though he were a troublesome insect. During the 
war he was in disgrace with the public, but after 
it he rose into general favour like a rocket. The 
chocolate soldier was no longer a joke, and it was 
found that many of his jests had been earnest. He 
was labelled " prophet," and his views began to 
be accepted as recklessly as they had been rejected 
in pre-war times. To-day, he is pointed to proudly 
by Britons who believe he is English, as the greatest 
living dramatist, and claimed eagerly by others who 
think he is Irish, as a sample of the genius which 
sprouts so readily on their native soil. He is accepted 
as a great man who is in some special way different 
from other men. It is not that he is a great dramatist, 
or a great speaker, or a great Socialist, or a great 
critic, or even that he is a combination of all four. 
A man could be all these and yet miss that capacity 
to arouse curiosity and expectancy in all classes 
on a world-wide scale which is George Bernard 
Shaw's special prerogative. 

In some mysterious way he provokes people he 
has never seen to write books about him. They 
want to tell the world what a great man he is, or 

14 



SHAW 

that he is not such a great man, or how he inspired 
them, or how they discovered him. The book is, 
of course, the authorised biography by Archibald 
Henderson, an American professor of mathematics. 
It is a model of industry, a meticulous record of 
Shaw's progress on every field, with a wealth of 
annotation ; it is a most carefully written volume, 
indispensable for reference, but it tells far more 
about the author than about his subject. Other 
commentaries, with one exception, have the same 
mirror-hke quality. They vary in key from Hen- 
derson's ecstatic tome to the offensive and defensive 
work by Frank Harris ; but when they have finished, 
the picture of Shaw is stiff and patchy, and the 
human quahties of the writer pulse through every 
chapter, particularly in those places where he 
describes how he corrected, or advised, or dis- 
agreed with his hero, with the excited and tri- 
umphant air of the child at the Zoo telling how he 
slapped the elephant. Harris was up in arms all 
the time : " Our chief difference is that Shaw 
wanted to be a man of action while I actually was." 
..." So he isn't as great as he himself supposes." 
He went on Hke that till it was almost pathetic. 
Only once did he provoke his subject to retort ; 
Shaw was hke Harris, and most other men, on one 
point : he could not stand being called a prude, 
and was prepared to go to great lengths to show that 
the epithet was undeserved. 

The study of Shaw written by Chesterton in 1905 

15 



SHAW 

was the exception. Its insight was uncanny, even 
if he did write Hke a Newfoundland dog pretending 
to be a kitten. It is impossible not to have sym- 
pathy with that exasperated reader who printed 
" beautifully written bunkum " on the title page 
of the copy of Chesterton's Shaw which still cir- 
culates in a Dublin library ; so it must have seemed 
to thousands, but the bunkum has turned out to 
be an appreciation of Shaw as a sincere thinker 
and a great dramatist, in days when opinion was 
divided between " brazen thruster " and " gifted 
clown " ; and the penetrating analysis of the man 
and his outlook with which it ends continues to-day 
to attest the soundness of the criticism and the con- 
sistency of the outlook. It was, of course, impos- 
sible for Chesterton to do justice to Shaw ; his 
mountainous generosity of spirit and his absurd 
English tolerance stood in his way at every turn ; 
here where weakness showed, the chance of a fine 
malicious twist of phrase was missed, and there 
where impish glee over individual inconsistency 
was called for, there was nothing but outrageous 
laughter at the way men are bound together in 
universal frailty. Fair and free as is this study of 
Shaw, it does not do anything to solve the mystery 
of the quality which induces Englishmen, Russians, 
Americans, Japanese, and Germans, to offer common 
worship at the shrine of Shaw and to pour gold into 
his lap. Like other mysteries of the kind, like 
Chaplin's charming twisted smile and Shake- 

i6 



SHAW 

speare's word-music, it is without formula and its 
effects cannot be communicated at second-hand 
any more than the manner of it can be successfully 
used by imitators. It must be tasted at the source. 
Those who wish to know about Shaw must read 
Shaw ; and even those who can't stand him should 
read him for the exhilaration of thinking of the 
things they would like to do to him. He caters for 
all tastes. Politicians and diplomats will find him 
full of meat. Preachers who feel themselves getting 
stale will rise from his writings with words trembling 
on their lips. Mothers will find his phrases excel- 
lent material with which to quell rebellious 
daughters, and rebellious daughters will find him 
their best backer. Burglars will follow him with 
zest tempered with horror at his views on private 
property. Murderers will want to get back to 
work when they find him coming their way : 

If I had the opportunity of conversing with 
the ghost of an executed murderer, I have no 
doubt he would begin to tell me eagerly about 
his trial, with the names of the distinguished 
ladies and gentlemen who honoured him with 
their presence on that occasion, and then about 
his execution. All of which would bore me 
r exceedingly. I should say, " My dear sir : 
such manufactured ceremonies do not interest 
me in the least. I know how a man is tried, 
and how he is hanged. I should have had you 
killed in a much less disgusting, hypocritical, 

S. j^ c 



SHAW 

and unfriendly manner if the matter had been 
in my hands. What I want to know about is 
the murder. How did you feel when you com- 
mitted it? Why did you do it? What did 
you say to yourself about it? If, like most 
murderers, you had not been hanged, would 
you have committed other murders ? Did you 
really disHke the victim, or did you want his 
money, or did you murder a person whom you 
did not disHke, and from whose death you 
had nothing to gain, merely for the sake of 
murdering ? If so, can you describe the charm 
to me ? Does it come upon you periodically ; 
or is it chronic ? Has curiosity anything to do 
with it? " I would ply him with all manner of 
questions to find out what murder is really like ; 
and I should not be satisfied until I had 
realised that I, too, might commit a murder, 
or else that there is some specific quality 
present in a murderer and lacking in me. 
And, if so, what that quaHty is. {Prefaces, 

Funny, isn't it ? It looks Hke sheer Hght-hearted, 
inconsequent, comic writing. It is diflicult to 
beHeve that he was intensely in earnest, and bent 
only on making his case in the most pungent pos- 
sible way for the particular method of dramatic 
presentation with which he was concerned at the 
moment he was writing. 

The person who is curious about Shaw — and who 

18 



SHAW 

can fail to be curious about a man who, early in his 
teens, decided to be honest with himself about 
himself and about the world as he saw it, and was 
able to keep it up in private for nearly seventy 
years, and in pubHc for half a century without being 
massacred ? — the person who is curious about Shaw 
must study him in the original. He may hate his 
assurance and damn his impudence, but he will 
not be able to deny his steadfastness of purpose and 
heroic honesty of thought and expression, however 
much he may disUke the creed which has the writer 
in its grip. 

In days to come, when Universities become less 
like highly exclusive clubs with labelled rooms and 
channelled ritual, someone may be inspired to 
suggest the award of a G.B.S. degree for students 
who take an interest in living men and women 
rather than in extracts of Hterature or preserved 
science. With the half hundredweight, or so, of 
Shaw's pubhshed writings to start with, it should be 
easy to organise the course of studies. Set lectures 
would be prohibited, and a candidate for the degree 
would have to spend half his time in and about 
libraries, classrooms and common-rooms, as the 
fancy moved him, and the other half at municipal 
council meetings, trade union gatherings, plays, 
concerts, churches, hospitals, factories, business 
men's lunch-rooms, and so on ; for at least one 
month he would have to work as temporary clerk in a 
Civil Service office. He would be required after 

19 



S HAW 

three years to show that he had a first-hand know- 
ledge of Shaw's views and of the activities of those 
places he had seen ; and he would then be turned 
loose and at any subsequent date — up to fifty years 
later — he would receive the G.B.S. degree if he 
were able to : 

(i) Give a clear statement of his belief. 

(2) Give a clear description of his normal daily 
behaviour. 

(3) Show that there was some reasonable con- 
nection between (i) and (2). 

It would do Universities no end of good to get off 
the beaten track. They cannot go on for ever with 
their compartmented classics and history from 
authorised text-books ; or can they ? At any 
rate, here at their hand is a man who has tried 
a great practical experiment with himself, and 
got mixed up with the affairs which will be history 
in a hundred years' time, and who has most care- 
fully and accurately recorded his observations and 
conclusions. He is as usable in his own way as a 
high-power microscope or explosive, and the process 
which goes on in his pages is as exciting as a steeple- 
chase. Unofficially and outside institutional walls 
he has been in use as a handbook, a moral support, 
a warning, an excuse, a stimulus, a guide. He is a 
wonderful educator with the great and unusual 
value that he has nothing specific to teach ; nothing 
seems to irritate him more than to be told by his 
disciples that they are doing or thinking just what 

20 



SHAW 

he says, or that they have fixed up their domestic 
affairs in accordance with his precepts. They miss 
his main point when they take over one of his sen- 
tences and bury themselves aHve in it. His formula 
has always been that formulation for others is not 
only impertinent but impossible, and if people are 
silly enough to swallow any of his prescriptions 
without criticism, they can only blame them- 
selves for the results. Accordingly, he pursues his 
prophetic way like one of those modern high-speed 
grindstones, guaranteed to knock some sparks out 
of the hardest material. He ranges widely enough 
to offer every man a test bench, where he can sit 
down with his thought in its crude state and grind 
his opinions into usable shape by holding them up 
against this impossible high-velocity Shaw. Re- 
moval of all loose parts and soft spots is guaranteed. 
The range of his researches and the varying play 
of his interests are irritating at first. People don't 
like being switched from religion to Blackpool, 
thence to suicide, back to plays and books, out to 
Florence Nightingale and away to the South Pole 
while reading half a page of printed matter [Pre- 
faces, p. 341). They like a man who sticks to his 
last, and these flickering changes bewilder them as 
the sudden and incomprehensible changes on the 
screen bewilder the stranger who enters a cinema 
after the show has started. If he has the patience 
to wait and sit through the picture again, bewilder- 
ment will vanish and the jerks which formerly 

21 



SHAW 

annoyed may delight him ; but who is going back 
to 1856 (or 1690) to sit through Shaw ? It is easier 
to scold him patronisingly for not settling down to 
be a straight dramatist, or to regret that a man 
with his splendid knowledge of psychology, or 
medical practice, or phonetics, or housing, or diplo- 
macy, does not enrich the world by spending his 
whole time in one of these fields instead of dropping 
a bomb into it as he flies past. Still his admirers 
could put up with his respect for their omnivorous- 
ness if he stopped there and conformed to their 
wish that he should occupy a particular kind of 
pedestal in each field of activity. His failure to 
satisfy them in this way is his chief offence. They 
are serious-minded people, and they know and feel 
the intensity of his seriousness about those things 
in which they are interested, but they simply cannot 
stand the inconsequence which is always lurking 
behind his great moments. Or, rather, they suspect 
and fear its presence ; and they earnestly long to 
remake him in their own image and likeness, and 
continually appeal to him in agonised tones not 
to spoil his noblest efforts with irreverent and 
irresponsible anti-climax. 

One of them, Mr. Gollis, after showing his hand 
with the gambit, " When I was a jellyfish I thought 
as a jellyfish, but now that I am a man I think 
as a man," and offering incense in the approved 
manner, goes on to chide, reprove, and scold his 
hero for his inconsistency and his bedevilment of 

22 



SHAW 

his choicest work. He at first complains of the 
incompatibihty of Man and Superman with Back to 
Methuselah, but he has not much justification here, 
for never did one work grow more logically out of 
another than the play of 192 1 out of the philosophy 
of 1902. Later, however, he makes home thrusts : 
he finds something curious in the last act of Major 
Barbara, when Shaw, by a sudden leap into farce, 
" seems to do his utmost to prevent the audience, 
or an impatient reader, from following Under- 
shaft's extremely diflScult line of argument ; " he 
is just as sound when he revolts against the anti- 
cHmax to the shooting of Napoleon, in Back to 
Methuselah, and accuses Shaw of sinking into " low 
comedy and vulgar farce ; " and he is in a majority 
of a million when he writhes at the St, John epilogue. 
But then, when he is on the trail of something really 
interesting, when he is a man holding in his hand 
three interlocking clues to the solution of his mysti- 
fication, he drops them and turns jellyfish with : 
** Whenever we are allowed to lose ourselves in 
some particularly fine passage we are always in 
danger of being rudely jerked back to earth by some 
paltry joke," and again with : " Why these comic 
kicks ? . . . They ravage their way into the loftiest 
passages, laying waste the exalted theme." The 
worshippers want their Shaw cut up into uniform 
lengths and laid out on a slab, but he refuses to be 
embalmed. In truth, he is alive and kicking, and 
some of the " comic kicks " are far more worthy 

23 



SHAW 

of careful examination than the ballyhoo passages 
which any literary hack can turn out with a little 
practice. His disciples sigh and feel that these 
paltry jokes are mistakes, instead of facts which 
must be reckoned with in any serious consideration 
of Shaw. The history of science is littered with 
just such " mistakes " — facts that will not fit a pet 
theory, or clash with some cramped assumption 
absorbed as final truth at the age of ten and made 
the bedrock of the beliefs of a lifetime. Sometimes 
it looks as though a motherly Nature scattered 
abnormalities around, knowing that man was so 
full of himself he would never notice anything till 
he barked his shins on it. And then instead of 
being grateful he grumbles and mutters about 
" Nature's mistakes." Uranus was supposed to 
be misbehaving himself as a planet till someone 
had the sense to see that the " mistakes " were his 
frantic efforts to introduce Neptune. Radium 
tried again and again to attract men's attention 
by outraging all elemental conventions. Bernard 
Shaw, obviously at heart a dear, sensitive, charitable 
gentleman, behaves like a word-fed rotary machine- 
gun, and instead of getting the attention such a 
phenomenon deserves, he is greeted — first with 
shouts of Ruffian ! Scoundrel ! — then with roars 
of laughter — and finally with rounds of applause, 
mixed with the scoldings of those who have looked 
into the depths of his mind and longed to put it to 
rights. 

24 



SHAW 

These are the comments of men. Women have 
not said so much about him, but what they do say 
is very much to the point. Three gifted women have 
summed him up in a single word, and each of the 
words is worth noting. Mrs. Patrick Campbell, 
rejoicing in early memories of the circus, gave him 
one look and said, "Joey." Mrs. Beatrice Webb, 
gathering her Shaw statistics together in one careful 
syllable, labelled him " Sprite." And Ellen Terry, 
with insight passing all analysis, went straight to 
the heart of the matter and called him " Bernie." 

Why all this contradiction and mystery? It 
can't be helped ; that's how all good stories begin, 
and the Shaw story is one of the best. He has told 
it all in his writings, but it is a difficult story to 
follow, partly because it is a long story, partly 
because he has tried to force the whole truth into 
a home-made creed, and partly because even the 
best of trumpets cannot blow itself effectively. 
The key to the story is his creed and the vigour with 
which he practises it. For he has a definite belief 
about the world and his place in it, and he lives his 
behef. He doesn't merely live up to it or turn to 
it on special occasions with a shamefaced awkward- 
ness or keep it in the background as a fire-escape ; 
he fills his life with it, in fact the core of it is that 
his creed and his life are as nearly one as he can 
make them. The creed is odd, but there is no doubt 
about the sincerity of his faith or the works with 

25 



SHAW 

which he backs it ; mountains have been moved, 
and even shaken till their rocks rattled, by the grip 
and impact of the ideas spread on that plain white 
paper in such fine neat writing. He has never tried 
to conceal this creed, and never wavered from it. 
From the Quintessence of Ibsenism, in 1890, to the 
preface to Back to Methuselah, in 1921, and on to the 
Black Girl, in 1932, he has continued to describe it 
and preach it in general and particular terms, in fact 
he has really never done anything else but write about 
it and its ramifications. For the sake of knowing 
what Shaw is driving at, and understanding those 
things which puzzle his admirers and even himself, 
it is worth while taking a good square look at this 
Life Force religion of his, and tracing it to its 
source. Impertinence ? Nonsense ! Religion may 
be a private affair in some cases, but the Life Force 
religion, which Shaw has preached around the world, 
and which is breaking out in such curious forms in 
Europe at present, is everybody's business. 



26 



CHAPTER II 

This is the story of Shaw's creed as it looks from 
the outside. It is set out here because it is by far 
the most important thing about him. It is the 
key to his conduct. The case to be made is — that a 
man who had a real belief in the tale of creation to 
be told in this chapter, and accepted the logical con- 
sequences of that belief, would behave as Shaw 
behaves ; and there is also the stranger case to be 
made — that a man driven by an intense love for 
truth, and a great respect for facts, to be dubious 
about the tale, would also behave as Shaw behaves. 
He would be a master of anti-chmax. This is all 
very mysterious, and it is right that it should be so, 
for at the back of it all is a real mystery — the 
mystery of being human — in which you and I and 
Shaw are all equally concerned, and for which let 
it be freely admitted no explanation is offered. 
All that is offered is a sorting out of the facts in 
the hope that some enlightenment will follow. 
Now this sorting out, particularly when it concerns 
itself with another man's creed, is far from being a 
simple matter. It is essential that the creed be 
stated accurately and at the same time in such a 
way that one can have sympathy with Shaw's 

27 



SHAW 

championship of it ; the reader must both under- 
stand it and see it somewhat as Shaw sees it, other- 
wise the promised key will be missing ; but he must 
first be warned of two difficulties which crop up 
at this point. 

The first is the obvious difficulty of prejudice 
which always arises when an outsider is stating the 
creed of an insider. Even when the outsider is 
trying to be a Christian, he is just as liable to error 
as the next man. The zoologist impaling butterffies 
in a case, even with the best will in the world, is 
liable to bruise something ; if he is a very expert 
zoologist with a pet theory, he is sure to make a 
special collection of butterflies to tally with it ; in 
his regard for scientific truth he may even snip the 
wings from any butterfly which dares to conflict 
with his theory, or twist some poor creature into 
an unnatural shape to demonstrate his ingenuity. 
The history of science is as deeply littered as the 
history of religion with cases of the strange behaviour 
of men who, above all things, wanted their own way. 
The outsider usually wants to discredit the creed 
which confficts with his own, and it will always 
be found that his tendency to distort truth is 
directly proportional to the weakness of his own 
position. Shaw, for instance, tries to make a place 
for his own doctrine by suggesting that Christians 
believe : 

that the world was made in the year 4004 B.C. ; 

that damnation means an eternity of blazing 
28 



SHAW 



brimstone ; that the Immaculate Conception 
means that sex is sinful and that Christ was 
parthenogenetically brought forth by a virgin 
descended in Hke manner from a line of virgins 
right back to Eve ; that the Trinity is an anthro- 
pomorphic monster with three heads which 
are yet only one head ; that in Rome the bread 
and wine on the altar become flesh and blood, 
and in England, in a still more mystical manner, 
they do and they do not ; that the Bible is an 
infallible scientific manual, an accurate his- 
torical chronicle and a complete guide to 
conduct ; that we may lie and cheat and 
murder and then wash ourselves innocent in 
the blood of the lamb on Sunday at the cost 
of a credo and a penny in the plate, and so on 
and so forth. 
And then goes on to make his real point : 

Civihsation cannot be saved by people not 
only crude enough to believe these things, but 
irreligious enough to believe that such a belief 
constitutes a religion. The education of chil- 
dren cannot safely be left in their hands. If 
dwindling sects like the Church of England, 
the Church of Rome, the Greek Church, and 
the rest, persist in trying to cramp the human 
mind within the limits of these grotesque per- 
versions of natural truths and poetic meta- 
phors, then they must be ruthlessly banished 
from the schools until they either perish in 

29 



SHAW 

general contempt, or discover the soul that 
is hidden in every dogma. {Prefaces^ p. 517.) 
This illustrates the difficulty perfectly. When so 
scrupulous and fair-minded a professional prophet 
cannot keep straight in dealing with a creed alien 
to his own, it is well for the amateur to be wary 
lest he, too, only succeed in adding to the sum of 
human ignorance and confusion. The process of 
skinning the believer — of separating him from that 
which is part of himself — must be preceded by 
study and undertaken with caution, if anything 
more than a few valueless mutilated scraps of his 
belief are to be secured. 

The second difficulty is that creeds have gone 
out of fashion and that words like " belief and 
" faith " are losing their meaning. So many 
certainties have been disturbed of late that people 
are beginning to put their trust in the belief that 
belief is not to be trusted. It is hard to make clear 
the significance of a real creed to those who are 
turning their believing faculty inside out and 
using it to doubt with. It is easy enough to describe 
Shaw's creed, or at least to set out the basis of it, 
but it is necessary also to show something of what it 
means to him, to convey some impression of the 
intensity with which he holds it. Many men have 
views on evolution, and the Life Force, similar to 
Shaw's, but they do not make them a personal 
matter ; they believe about evolution, he believes 
in it ; they think it is something which happened 

30 



S H A W 

millions of years ago and has nothing to do with 
them ; he thinks it is something which is happening 
to-day and has everything to do with him, that it 
is him, and he is it, and that together they are 
life. But perhaps this is not making matters any 
easier and it may be better to seek some common 
ground to show what is here meant by belief. 

Take the Derby at Epsom. Even in the upper 
reaches of the Amazon and the inner recesses of 
China, the English Derby is common property ; 
every man knows that it is a race for the best three- 
year-olds in the world, or if he doesn't, tries to 
pretend that he does. He is ashamed, and rightly 
ashamed, of not knowing such a splendid and 
reputable fact. There is simply no doubt about the 
Derby. Some people have more intimate know- 
ledge than others, and can say off-hand that Wragg 
won on Blenheim in 1930, others think that a Derby 
winner should have a good chance in the Grand 
National ; but these little contrasts only help us to 
enjoy our certainty ; they don't alter the fact or 
our belief about it, or our readiness to get together 
over it. On the contrary those who are strangers 
to Epsom and know but little are always anxious 
to be put in touch with those who know something, 
and those who have information are always de- 
lighted to share it abroad. Here is genuine belief. 
The creed, if you like, is primitive, and has but one 
article, but see how the belief remains equally 
certain through all degrees of intensity and how 

31 



SHAW 

minor misconceptions have no effect either on the 
reahty of the event or the vaHdity of belief in it. 
But, some may object, this state of certainty is not 
behef at all but mere knowledge based on direct 
experience, such as science gives. They would 
have more than a little difficulty in applying this 
objection to the Australian who always backs the 
favourite, or to the enthusiast, born in 1887, who 
believes that Hermit won in grand style in 1867. 
And even if the sceptic could prove his point and 
show that the mundane belief that there is such a 
race as the Derby is not a belief at all, he would 
still have to face the task of demolishing the other 
deeper belief connected with this race. It is a 
wonderful belief which has nothing to do with 
the restricted realm of science. Behind the fact, 
behind the event, is a faith which transcends 
experience and which, in a sense, precedes and 
materialises the event. The sceptic, if he is ignorant 
of horse-racing, will unfortunately not see this ; 
to him the whole affair may even seem a sordid 
matter of money and horses. He will not see that 
a belief in something quite intangible is at work 
behind the scenes, brushing aside doubt, triumphing 
over a million difficulties, bringing men of all 
parties together, and making them at home with 
one another. Men, for a little while, have a real 
belief in honour. The Derby is what it is because 
so many people want to see and share in an honest 
race, and because they believe that here at least the 

32 



SHAW 

men are giving the horses a chance. Out of this 
spontaneous act of belief is born the glory of that 
day at Epsom. 

Now there are some people who believe that this 
race takes place, but who never saw it and would 
not cross the road to see it ; this belief is to them 
only a belief about the Derby, it is a seed perishing 
annually on stony soil. But consider the others : 
think of the man who loves horses and the sim- 
mering life of great crowds ; who has never missed 
that Epsom meeting since he was a boy ; who 
looks forward to it from year to year ; who talks, 
reads, dreams and lives in a horse world " of risk 
and trust and speculation and daring ; " whose 
highest ambition is to breed, own, train, and lead 
in a Derby winner. He believes in the Derby and 
partakes of it in a way which no mere half-crown- 
each-way partaker understands ; he is no more 
certain than anyone else that the event is real and 
will recur annually, but the quality of his belief 
is different and is not to be conveyed by any word 
picture of the crowds, the horses and the race, 
however accurate and detailed. It is a real 
belief. 

Real beliefs, strangely enough, are not a guarantee 
of the truth of what is believed ; they seem to wind 
themselves about fictions and myths as easily as 
about facts and truth, but their effect is always the 
same : " They create, as the case may be, heroes 
and saints, great leaders, statesmen, preachers and 

33 



SHAW 

reformers, the pioneers in discovery in science, 
visionaries, fanatics, knight-errants, demagogues 
and adventurers," and also, Newman might have 
added, great racing men and great dramatists. 
But whatever the type, the first step towards 
knowing the man is to discover the outhnes of his 
creed. 

The creed of the Life Force as outHned by Shaw 
has scarcely any outlines. His version of Creative 
Evolution is somewhat different from Bergson's whose 
particular speciality it is . They seem to have arrived 
at certain similar points of view independently, 
and each has brought them to a focus in his own 
way. Shaw was first in the field, with a multitude 
of facts and instances, launching his campaign for 
the new religion, in concrete form, from every angle 
of human interest. Bergson came later, with close- 
knit argument and his ingenious idea about time, 
and more cautiously put very much the same story 
into abstract form. He began with a goddess called 
la duree, threw in one of those strange philosophic 
gods called " an infinity of shooting out " and made 
them jointly responsible for everything, literally 
every thing. It is all very ingenious. La duree in 
particular is a fascinating creature, but she does not 
appear in Shaw's version of Creative Evolution, nor 
does he seem to realise how necessary she is, nor 
the difficulties which evolutionary theories get into 
when their authors neglect to put some curb on the 
time which they lose so recklessly to produce man 

34 



SHAW 

and the amceba. Bergson knew all about that ; but 
Shaw was shy of abstract thought, he liked real 
things — real people — real happenings — on every 
page, and he left time to look after itself 

The idea of Creative Evolution is based, in the 
first place, on the facts put forward, from time to 
time, in favour of the theory of the gradual evolu- 
tion of species. It is not concerned with, or, at best, 
only gives a chilly nod to, other facts having to do 
with the gradual evolution of the whole universe. 
Its date of emergence is about 1859, when The 
Origin of Species was published by Charles Darwin, 
and when for the first time the theory of evolution 
was dealt with in a thorough and scientific manner. 
There had been plenty of isolated, half-hearted 
attempts to launch evolutionary theories in former 
years and centuries, but this W2is the first thoughtful, 
well-planned, comprehensive attempt. Darwin was 
a scientist of the old school. He said in effect : 
** Here's what happens and here's why it happens," 
and left it open to anyone to check both statements. 
He was certainly elated by the all-round neatness 
of his theory, and the way all his facts fitted in, 
but he never lost his head about it. He knew 
that whatever success he had gained in explaining 
" How is a hen ? " he was as far off as ever from 
the answer to " Why is a hen ? " Intrepid admirers 
found no difficulty about such questions, and, 
sheltered behind the reputations of real scientists, 
they started off to produce the first scientific journ- 

35 



SHAW 

alism — all about molecules and mammals and the 
sheer inevitability of everything. Between the 
straight science of Darwin and this popular science, 
there slowly developed other growths fostered by 
those who wished to save something of value from 
the mechanists and hammer the new hypothesis 
into a religion. 

One of these growths was inspired, taken in hand, 
nourished, trimmed and tended by a succession of 
men — Butler, Ibsen, Wells for awhile, Bergson and 
the rest — so that it grew and grew like Jack's 
beanstalk. But the fairy story is upside down, the 
hero is up in the topmost branch, playing solitaire, 
and the ogre is down below tangled in the roots. 

To find these roots go back five thousand years 
— and then a million years — and then back over 
aeons and eras — back and back till you are dazed 
and floundering in the mists of time, and can 
imagine dimly only one formless meaningless Thing 
which is not time or space, but is somehow entangled 
in them, which has no parts but only potentiality, 
which has no quality whatever, but is itself mean- 
ingless unceasing Action. This Thing is the Ulti- 
mate Mystery, the meaning of all things reduced 
to the very lowest term. It cannot be described, 
but can be pictured dimly, in those far-off stretches 
of time, from the results of its experiments, as " a 
seething omnipotent unordered force " — " a whirling 
vortex of meaningless energy " — " an infinity of 
aimless shooting out." Blend with this first shadowy 

36 



SHAW 

impressionistic glimpse of origins an idea of terrific 
striving power ; there must be no values, no evil, 
no good, nothing except infinite, restless Power ; 
but do not confuse this Power with the mechanical 
power then being born in the first cataclysmic 
delivery of flying particles which were to be atoms, 
nor yet identify it with the vital power which 
appeared later on this earth, as the basic force 
surged wildly in the atoms it had created by chance. 
This basic Force lies behind, and is the unwitting 
cause of those minor powers ; it is not apart from 
them, but, blindly asserting itself, is embedded and 
enwrapped in its own assertions. 

So the first tiny cell, trembling into life on this 
planet, was just a chance experiment which neither 
knew, nor was known by, the Life Force. Neither 
it nor its successors knew, as they rose into life and 
motion with time and faded away into death, that 
they did so but to maintain this blind experimenting 
Force which pushed this way and that ; sometimes 
failing and coming to a full stop, but always thrust- 
ing out in new directions, moving along other 
branches, up and up and up ; undying, as it passed 
from parent to child, and spurred, through its 
sensitive appetites, each fresh dwelling to build up 
the new habits, which were to become new func- 
tions, in the budding cells of fresh generations. So, 
in the beginning of the era of living things, con- 
fusion reigned, as the surviving inventions battled 
with new creations, as the old experiments of 

37 



SHAW 

Floods and Frosts, so successful in the formative 
ages, wiped out the new ones of Plants and Animals, 
and as great Beasts preyed on one another, driven 
by the blind Force which surged within them, and 
emerged as the Will-to-Live. Here is no chance 
mechanism, but a positive Vital Force " willing " 
the things which help it to survive. The herbage- 
cropping quadruped, starving in drought, is driven 
by some inner urge to satisfy his hunger with foliage 
which his ancestors ignored, and so survives in 
conditions which destroyed them. Centuries later, 
a descendant, finding the foliage beyond his reach, 
uses the same will-to-live and purposefully up- 
stretches with all his might to reach the higher 
branches. He and his offspring may perish, but, 
sooner or later in the line, the neck-producing cells 
co-ordinate under the creating impulse, passed 
down from the pioneer, and the long-necked giraffe 
is born. 

Thus Life moves on trying — willing — learning in 
its several units, till at last by many striving coinci- 
dences self-consciousness, reason and imagination 
blend, and man emerges. For thousands of years 
he too stumbles on, carrying with him traces of 
the spent forces of other ages at war with these 
newer and nobler efforts of the Life Force ; lower 
instincts from the past fight wildly against the 
uplifting thoughts of the present ; from time to 
time the Life Force produces outstanding men, to 
whom some idea is all-in-all, who give themselves 

38 



SHAW 

to it unstintingly, and in so doing 
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, some 
such men — ^hitherto acting blindly — ^become dimly 
conscious of a Great Purpose. Here and there 
through Europe and America appear individuals 
who realise that the race is greater than the person, 
and that it is being held back in its upward struggle 
by those who cling in blind, static superstition to 
outworn creeds, fixed standards, and tribal ritual. 
These New Men, in their consciousness of the 
upward and onward thrust of evolution and of the 
part they are called on to play, are the true heirs 
of the ages. They are akin to the artist-prophets of 
former years, but with a difference. They know 
that they are sports. They know vaguely the mean- 
ing of themselves. They know that they are the very 
apex of achievement to date, that only through 
them — through their inspiration and effort — can 
the Life Force achieve greater consciousness of 
itself and reach that perfection which is eternally 
its goal. 

This is the basis of Shaw's creed, and the founda- 
tion of his philosophy. It is but the barest outline of 
an outhne of the new story of Creation, and only the 
shadowy hint of a hint of the underlying process. 
It is admittedly defective owing to the difficulty 
of describing the activities of that which has no 
attributes — a task to which it must be admitted 
Shaw has unstintingly devoted himself The story 
has been found attractive. The cultured classes 

39 



SHAW 

had garbled versions of it in 1880, and nearly 
everyone has it to-day. There is in every day's 
news, in scientific journals, in all the best-sellers, 
and in the very latest religions, every evidence of its 
growing popularity. 

This account of Creative Evolution at work 
through the Ages is, then, only a poor but honest 
attempt to make a preface to the Preface to Back 
to Methuselah, to which the reader is advised to go if 
he wishes to know what Shaw's creed is really like. 
Or he can go to Bergson and find : 

" Life is the effort made by energy to become 
free. It uses the powers and properties of 
matter, storing itself up and releasing itself 
in free action and in so doing becoming ever 
more free. It first institutes movement in 
matter, and this movement having resolved 
itself into the solar system, among other things, 
life hits by a lucky chance on the chlorophyllian 
function as a means of storing up energy and 
releasing it in spurts and bursts of ' creative- 
ness.' The impetus of life is finite, it has been 
given once for all, and must work its own way. 
It is a slow stumbling worker ever trying and 
failing and trying again." 
Or to Rosenberg and read : 

" A new sense of life which is conscious 
however of being rooted in the primitive 
past, pushes to the surface, and takes form ; 
a new view of life is born and begins to demand 

40 



SHAW 

an account of ancient forms, sacred usages, 
and traditional values." 
Or he may get the idea purged and refined in the 
editorial pages o^ Nature (December 7th, 1935) : 

" Science has not only emancipated human 

thought from the bondage of traditional 

authority, but also, through the concept of 

evolution onward and upward, has provided 

mankind with a new philosophy of life." 

If he is curious enough to go further, he will find 

that Bergson, as becomes a philosopher, pursues his 

way calmly, moulding his creation into shape with 

pleasing, flowing words, but ever standing apart 

from it ; while Rosenberg jumps into the arena and 

spreads the Life Force story among a million readers 

in the Myth of the 20th Century, impetuously telling 

the tale of a new cell activity which is welding with 

great blows of the Nordic hammer all plastic German 

souls into one great race soul, and subordinating the 

individual to the state ; to the dismay of Nature's 

editor, who, in the upthrusting of the Life Force in 

England, has just discerned the emancipation of 

human thought from the shackles of authority. 

But this search through the modes in which the 
Life Force is expressing itself to-day leads only 
through confusion into boredom, and it is better to 
stick to Shaw, who never bores, however much he 
may confuse. The other prophets are unbearably 
dull as they go on and on ; he somehow manages to 
say things which sound the same, but have a curious 

41 



SHAW 

freedom and elasticity of their own, as though he 
were standing despair on its head, and making it 
wave its legs in hope. He braces himself against the 
same base as the others, he shoots his arrows from 
the same citadel of modified Lamarck-Darwinism 
but he is different. He seems to have faith in what 
he is saying. The rest of them believe the Life Force 
story with about as much energy as they believe 
that the weather is going to be wet ; they are 
careful not to allow belief to become mixed up with 
behaviour. 

Shaw, on the other hand, seems at an early stage 
to have accepted this story of creation, or something 
like it, then to have said to himself : " Where do I 
come in ? " and to have seen that words alone 
could not answer that question. He gave his assent 
to the story, but instead of treating that as the end 
of the matter — going out and getting a good job as 
a journalist, and settling down to vegetate in com- 
fort — he made his assent only the beginning, and with 
wild, indomitable logic, tried to conform his 
thoughts, words and actions to it. The *' good job " 
was to him not living at all. Life was not a set of 
operations to be carried out according to rules laid 
down by London editors or even by the English 
upper classes. Life was he — Bernard Shaw — a 
man, alive, in a wonderful, ever-active world. But, 
so far as he could see, the sign-posts marked " This 
way to heaven " were all pointing in different 
directions. Way back about 1880 or earlier he 

42 



SHAW 

must have become aware of bewilderment and taken 
as a headline " Follow conscience for all you're 
worth." And then the fun began. It is an exciting 
headline for any man, but the tumult is usually a 
private matter ; in this case, with George Bernard 
Shaw hanging on to it for grim life, the results 
became a public spectacle for the world. No other 
prophet of Creative Evolution has risked the attempt 
to merge into one the cosmic story and the personal 
story. In his case the results have been given such 
labels as novels, pamphlets, plays, prefaces and 
letters, essays and tomfooleries, but such listing 
breaks up their unity and hides their meaning. 
From the early letters to Public Opinion in 1875, to 
the latest play in 1936, these writings are the 
scientific record of an extraordinary experiment in 
one-man living. 

Sometimes the microscope is turned inwards, and 
sometimes outwards, but always the observations 
are made with the utmost care, and most faithfully 
recorded. This does not look like science because 
there is no laboratory, no mathematics, no chloro- 
formed kitten under a bell jar ; but any man who 
records his experiences accurately and honestly is 
a real scientist, and perhaps a poet as well. Shaw 
is a wonder as a first-hand observer and honest 
recorder, and his works are the results, disguised as 
plays and so on, covering an immense variety of 
experience. When he wants to say just what he 
feels and thinks about the particular specimen under 

43 



SHAW 

observation, he writes a preface ; when he wants to 
hold up to the public a variety of other views plus 
his own, he writes a play. He ranges over every- 
thing freely, that is, freely within the limits of his 
creed. Other men write poems, plays and pam- 
phlets in accordance with some prescribed formula, 
and get results fit for immediate embalming ; or else 
they write with absolute freedom, and get sentences 
which don't parse, written with words which aren't 
in the dictionary ; they try to get the Inner Light 
to do all the work, including the thinking. Shaw 
is prepared to say anything whatever, and to stand 
by the Inner Light through thick and thin, but he 
likes the practical record of his inspiration to stand 
to reason. His allegiance to reason is vigorously 
denied by large property owners, who can see 
nothing but madness in a well-to-do man saying that 
Russians are respectable, but he is really terribly 
reasonable in all secondary matters. There's only 
one author like him — a man who began with a page 
full of axioms and wrote books and books out of 
them — Euclid is inexorable. The man who accepts 
Euclid's axioms is done for, he must swallow every 
last bit of every single book to the last Q.E.D. 
His only chance is to say at the very beginning, 
" That last axiom looks crazy to me." 

The point is that Shaw is true to his creed. It 
would have made things simpler for everyone if he 
had put his axioms on the first page like his great 
rationaHst predecessor. That is why they are set 

44 



SHAW 

out here at an early stage in the form of an account 
of creation, which can be examined at leisure. 
If Shaw is right about that he is right about every- 
thing else. Meanwhile, a lot of other questions arise. 
How did he come to believe such a story ? Why did 
he throw overboard an extraordinary story about 
a whale, and then take up with a tall tale about a 
giraffe ? What have evolutionary theories to do 
with play writing ? What difference does a man's 
belief make to his day's work ? Surely it's all a 
publicity ramp ? What has conscience got to do 
with it ? What's the use of bothering about begin- 
nings ? What does Shaw know about them ? Who is 
Shaw ? 



45 



CHAPTER III 

He is one of the Kilkenny-Dublin Shaws, friends 
of the great Ponsonbys. Sir John Ponsonby, a hard- 
headed firm-fisted north-of-England man, first came 
to Ireland with Cromwell as colonel in a cavalry 
regiment. He had all the qualities as soldier, 
business man, administrator and diplomatist neces- 
sary for acquiring lands during the Commonwealth, 
and holding them under the Restoration. The 
property passed to his son, Sir Henry, who, not being 
very sure of his ground under the Stuarts, backed 
William at the Battle of the Boyne, and established 
his position. His brother and heir. Sir William, 
finally consolidated the family fortunes, and ad- 
vanced into the Irish nobility, gaining the titles 
of Viscount Duncannon and Baron Bessborough. 

This process of advancement was not accom- 
plished without loyal and willing help from Captain 
William Shaw of Hampshire, who came over and 
did his bit in Sir Henry's regiment at the Battle of 
the Boyne, and thereafter settled down in the shelter 
of the Bessborough estate on the southern border of 
County Kilkenny. The partnership, so happily 
begun in 1690, continued in the following genera- 
tions and the Shaws and Ponsonbys remained, 

46 



SHAW 

during the next century, in close and loyal 
association in those pleasant lands north of the Suir, 
where the salmon-fishing and fox-hunting were so 
fine, and where the rich wines of the South could 
be rolled cask by cask from the deck of the Portuguese 
lugger up to the very door. 

Those were wonderful days for the Shaws, in the 

early eighteenth century, with the woods of Kilkenny 

behind them, the sun slanting across the shadowy 

Gomeraghs down on the wide sweep of the river in 

front, the rich land giving its store for all their needs 

and a powerful patron over all. The savour of 

them dwells in the pages of Somerville and Ross — 

descendants of another of Cromwell's officers, 

Colonel Bushe, who made his home in the next 

pleasant valley a few miles away — as they write 

of their great-grandfather, Charles Kendal Bushe : 

" Kilkenny is a warm comfortable county, 

of wide, rich pastures and wooded demesnes 

and stately houses, with a big blue river running 

swift and strong through its heart, the River 

Nore, that has salmon to be caught that match 

the river in speed and strength. Mountains it 

has not, but there are hills that make a purple 

margin for its landscapes, and above all the 

other counties, it has trees, calm and superb, 

with perfection undisturbed by such wind as 

south-west Ireland knows. Kilfane and Kil- 

murray march together, and their boundary 

line is buried in trees. Splendid oaks, serene 

47 



SHAW 

in unhindered growth ; chestnuts, that when I 
first saw Kilmurray were deep seas of green, 
with their myriad pale flowers Kke lamps 
reflected in troubled water : and beyond all 
other trees were the beeches, great domes of 
purple, some of them, but most were of the 
delicate shimmering green that is the lovely 
coming-out dress in which they meet the 
summer, and in their shade the wild bluebells 
were spreading like blue air between the grey 
trunks. 

" Charles, who never missed a chance of 
getting on a horse, had gone for a morning ride. 
He had ridden into Kilmurray and galloped 
round the park. The lake that, so long ago, 
he had himself helped to plan and enlarge, was 
brimming. He jumped the little stream that 
fed it, and looked long at the reflection in the 
lake of the house he was born in " {An Incor- 
ruptible Irishman, p. 208). 
It was splendid for the young men of those days to 
belong to such a county and to know that so many 
acres of it belonged to them ; but marriages were 
early, and there were children by the dozen, and 
in a few generations there was room only for the 
eldest, and younger sons began to be forced out, 
into military service and into the growing towns. 
Numbers of young Shaws had to leave the land, and 
branch out into respectable professions each genera- 
tion. Two of these branches are full of interest. 

48 



SHAW 

The first springs from Robert Shaw, a fifth son, 
who left the old home in the 1 760's, and became a 
very capable Accountant-General of the Post Office. 
His son Robert, born 1774, married an heiress in 
1796 and by 1800 was showing his quality both in 
Parliament and in the comparatively new and 
interesting business of banking. He voted against 
the Union, when a vote on the other side was said 
to be worth anything from £30,000 to an earldom, 
and he steered his business through the financial 
straits of the early nineteenth century with such 
credit and profit that it became the basis of the 
Royal Bank of Ireland in 1 836. He was made baronet 
in 1 82 1 . It is pleasant for those who see in the victory 
at the Boyne the beginnings of modern civilisation, 
to visualise young Captain William Shaw, on a white 
horse, charging the stricken enemy behind Sir Henry 
Ponsonby ; then to see them together later, so 
comfortably settled in their sylvan retreat ; then 
to see young Sir Robert standing, with four stalwart 
Ponsonbys, against the corruption of the Union ; and 
finally to find the old partnership commemorated 
generation after generation in Ponsonby Shaw 
(born 1784), sheriff and banker, Ponsonby Shaw 
(born 1 810), lieutenant-colonel in the Madras army, 
and Ponsonby Shaw (born 1846) major in the late 
95th Foot. 

The other branch springs from Bernard Shaw, a 
third son, first cousin of the baronet, who left the 
old home in the 1 790's, became a kind of lawyer- 

49 



SHAW 

cum-broker, married a rector's daughter in 1802, 
and died in 1826, leaving behind an indomitable 
wife and fourteen children. How she managed to 
bring them up, as Henderson says : " in an unshaken 
and unshakable consciousness of their aristocracy," 
is one of the mysteries of those times, but it may be 
guessed that the banker-baronet, who provided a 
house for them in Terenure, was continuously 
helpful. Her third son, George Carr Shaw, married 
Lucinda Gurly in 1852, and settled down modestly 
at 3 Synge Street, Dublin. 

At this house on July 26th, 1856, there was 
delivered that tender protoplasmic mass of curious, 
dim, Shaw-Gurly memories, enHvened by that 
entity incredibly new and free, which was to be 
called George Bernard and was to open self-con- 
scious, observant eyes on the DubHn of the 'sixties. 

A visitor to the Ireland of to-day will not find it 
difficult to reconstruct that Dublin. No. 3 Synge 
Street is now No. 33, and remains its box-like, 
yellow-bricked, basement-kitchened, granite-coped, 
bijou-Georgian self, the model of thousands built 
for genteel and not too well-to-do Dubliners, over 
a century ago. Behind the house the Grand Canal 
opened out into the Portobello Basin, from which 
the south city drew its drinking water, and on which 
the " Fly-boats " had rested a few years before, 
after their breathless dash up from Kildare at nine 
miles an hour, to discharge their passengers at the 
door of the Portobello Hotel. In 1850 William 

50 



SHAW 

Dargan was changing all that. He was building 
railways from the provinces to Dublin, and making 
a reputation for himself as a captain of industry, 
and the wealthiest man in Ireland. It was the age 
of Exhibitions ; eleven miles of stands of " all that 
was wonderful and exquisite " at the Crystal Palace 
were exciting the public mind, disturbing old 
conventions, stimulating new wants, rocketting 
industrialism, and making Ruskin and Morris wild. 
Fashionable Ireland wished to be in the swim, and 
Dargan, eager to help, was backing the first of the 
Dublin Exhibitons on Leinster Lawn in 1853. 
Dublin society was delighted, and supported it in 
the elegant, carefree, complimentary-ticket kind of 
way that has brought tears to the eyes of the 
guarantors of so many enterprises in that city, and 
in those days cost Dargan ^26,000. 

Within easy reach of Synge Street, in a house on 
Stephens Green, Cardinal Newman was planning 
a beautiful church and dreaming of a Cathohc 
University while he looked out at the great open 
space, so suitable for his purpose, which lay between 
him and the newly built Harcourt Street Railway 
Station. But the idea of University materialises 
slowly, and while he thought and wrote, two young 
men named Guinness, to whom ^{^26,000 was but 
petty cash, were looking at the site and making 
much faster progress with their idea of its suitability 
for exhibition purposes. It was taken over, a great 
hall was built, and in it were housed the Great 

51 



SHAW 

Dublin Exhibitions of 1865 and 1872. The stands 
were interesting. 

The gas engine, telephone, and electric light were 
still unknown, but electro magnets had had their 
day, and city people were in a position to yawn 
politely when their country cousins chattered 
excitedly before models of the electric telegraph and 
the wonderful electric clock. Scientists had done 
wonders, but engineers and business men had not 
yet caught up, and so far there was little but rather 
clumsy dynamos to be seen. Still there was the 
wonderful sewing machine just beginning to come 
on the market in quantity, and a new material 
called rubber with amusing properties. A grey 
powder — Portland Cement — was being boosted as 
the building material of the future, to the uncon- 
cealed amusement of the brickmakers and quarry 
owners. There were great stands of Staffordshire 
pottery and rows and rows of chimney pieces in fine 
ironmongery and " a splendid array of gas fittings 
including gazaliers of various patterns, brackets and 
all the elegant modes of dispensing artificial light in 
society." 

But nothing could surpass the thrill of the steam 
engine, with its whirling flywheel, and the maze 
of machines that could be made to dance attendance 
on it. It was old in the 'seventies, but still new. 
Even yet, there is something about that smooth 
flux of power under finger-tip control, which 
fascinates people as they watch the easy, powerful 

52 



SHAW 

pulse of the piston rod, and the curious baby- 
like sparring of the eccentrics. But in 1872 ! To 
think that never before in the history of the world 
had a locomotive been . . . and to be alive along 
with it ! To have been born into a horse-world, 
and to see the modern miracle of the railways spread 
out to take command of it ! Kipling was not yet 
under way, but the ideas he was to mould into 
poetry were already elusively dancing in the crowded 
aisles in those Exhibition years. 

Young George Bernard Shaw seems to have been 
unmoved by the great shows going on so near him, 
as family ups and downs moved him first to a larger 
house. No. I Hatch Street, and then to lodgings in 
61 Harcourt Street. At sixteen he was delving into 
books and music and more incHned to look ques- 
tioningly at the throngs passing down Earlsfort 
Terrace, then to go into raptures over " electro 
copies of great antique vases " or " work-boxes of 
mother of pearl." From his birth his home had 
been an unusual one, in which good music was as 
common as bread and butter, and used as freely 
and naturally. His mother had a lovely voice, and 
the aunt who had otherwise brought her up with 
such Puritan caution and rigour had recklessly 
given her an excellent musical education. She 
joined forces with a gifted music teacher, George 
Vandaleur Lee, and in No. i Hatch Street, Gounod, 
Verdi and Donizetti were as much at home as Tom, 
Dick and Harry in the ordinary household. 

53 



SHAW 

Shaw learnt music without consciousness of 
learning, as a child in a pleasant home learns good 
manners. His taste was nourished from the begin- 
ning, and the sensitiveness of his ear developed as 
naturally as the strength of his limbs. In due time 
came conscious knowledge, and the delight in 
widening it, ordering it, and making it at home 
which everyone who has ever gathered anything 
from stamps to stars can understand and share in a 
slight way. Clear understanding is not so easy, for 
there is something close and intimate here which 
rebels against analysis and is not easily amenable to 
reason ; see how music-minded people begin their 
discussions so courteously and end by just " going 
on " at one another. It will not do, then, to be 
too clever and psycho-analytical and lazy, and find 
the whole future springing from the over-develop- 
ment of one particular faculty, the encouragement 
of intense and unbalanced sensibilities, and the 
growth of a form of expression to give them an 
outlet when capacity for musical composition and 
performance was lacking. That would be pure 
speculative eyewash, and would rule out all the 
pleasant, human, interesting influences which con- 
tributed to the startling appearance, in London 
of the 'eighties, of a young man who not only knew 
what was wrong with the world, but also knew what 
to do about it. Still, the influence of music was 
fundamental ; the part it played is evident at every 
turn, in the trend of his thoughts, in his career and 

54 



SHAW 

in his writings. The great composers were his 
earliest teachers, and their operas were his fairy 
tales, and from the beginning, there was a gulf 
between the boy to whom music was a native 
language to an inner ear, and the other boys to 
whom it was so much sound. It was a gulf which 
was to grow with every development of that sensitive 
discriminating ear, and to make him forever 
something of a stranger to the rest of us, to whom 
music is at best a pleasant noise which we can stand 
for a couple of hours at a time for culture's sake. 

The story of those days will be found in the preface 
to his first novel. Immaturity. The preface was 
written forty years after the novel, and gains in 
pungency what it loses in the ill-balanced emphasis 
of a man of sixty-five writing of his youth. He 
seems to have mixed Httle with others of his age, 
and to have passed from childhood to manhood 
without that intermediate stage in which the male 
measures himself against other boys, and makes 
some essential adjustments during a period of 
physical destructiveness and general devilment. 
When other boys, in pairs and gangs, were breaking 
windows, laws and everything else that stood in 
their small ways, he was reading and following up 
with delight the antics of those wonderful figures 
which troop so readily into any young imagination 
which invites them. Reading and music went 
hand in hand to give material and impetus to the 
events of his dream worlds, and the great dramas 

55 



SHAW 

going on around him seem to have been almost 
ignored. He was busy playing with the wonderful 
works men had created for his delight. It mattered 
not whether they were in words or music — the two 
flowed so easily in his mind that he scarce needed 
to distinguish them. Shelley must have come early. 
He had been in Dublin in the Ufetime of Shaw's 
parents, enthroned in a balcony in O'Connell 
Street distributing pamphlets on world reform to 
the passers-by ; he was real, and his story was 
vivid, to cultured Dublin of the 'seventies ; and his 
message brimming in sense and sound, was an 
intoxicating draught for young George Bernard. 

Poets and composers were his heroes, and his 
interest spread from them to the others, who 
created in colour and stone, and sent him in his 
teens wandering round the Dublin Art Galleries. 
It is small wonder he cared little for engines and 
mechanical things from factories, or for the mass 
activities of men. Only the individual — the crafts- 
man — could produce this thing called beauty which 
stirred him so mysteriously and set him apart from 
the world which was making its first wild gropings 
towards mass production. He had no interest in 
the struggle between iron and steel, in which Henry 
Bessemer had just scored such a victory, nor could 
he get excited about the difference between basic 
and phosphoric ores, which was the essence of 
romance to the Gilchrists. He did not care in the 
least about the lack of standardisation in the 

56 



S H A W 

engineering industry' ; he probably never e\-en 
heard of WhiUvorth nor of the efforts he was making 
to get British manufacturers to reaHse the value of 
exact measurement and precise standards. But 
this is scarcely surprising ; neither he. nor anyone 
but a few far-seeing business men. reaHsed the close 
connection between \Vhit\vorth's teaching and the 
possibility' of turning out guns and ammunition 
more rapidly than men could fire them off. The 
Crimean and American wars had just fizzled out 
on old slow-going traditional Hues, and Germany 
was beginning to demonstrate the superiority- of 
the new mode in which rapid movement was 
backed by equally rapid munition output, but to 
Shaw-among-the-artists the Franco-Prussia war 
was an event on the ven- margin of conscious- 
ness. 

Neither he, nor his family, nor any of their class, 
noticed the greater conflict going on nearer home. 
It was a new form of the long-lasting Anglo-Irish 
struggle in which the opposing forces were now 
landlords and tenants. There had been a terrifying 
engagement in the 'forties, in which the mortalitv^ 
of the tenants and their families reached 900,000. 
The landlords called this '* The Great Famine " 
and continued to press for rent, complaining of the 
disaffection and ingratitude of the lower classes, 
and calHng occasional casualties which occurred 
among themselves '' dastardly murders." The 
Times of 1872 speaks for them : 

57 



SHAW 

The Imperial legislature should endeavour 
to govern each individual section of the immense 
population under its sway, as those composing 
it would wish to govern themselves, supposing 
them to be sufficiently enhghtened to wish 
well. . . . Ireland is now governed as nearly 
as possible ... as we might suppose Ireland 
to govern herself were she in her right mind. 
This did not raise even a smile in the Shaw house- 
hold. George Carr Shaw had an acute and mis- 
chievous sense of humour, but anything touching 
the prestige of the class to which he belonged, was 
sacred. He looked on the wretched Irish as a 
separate species, and did his utmost to save his son 
from contact with them. The very existence of 
the Ponsonby-Shaw class hung on this conviction of 
their superiority to the mere Irish ; it was often 
combined with kindness and consideration of the 
quality sometimes shown to domestic animals : 
see, in the novels of Lover and Lever, how benignly 
the culture and elegance of the quality contrasts 
with the crudity and credulity of the native ; their 
faith in the eternal propriety of this contrast was 
about all that remained of the Puritan doctrines 
of former days, and their religion consisted mainly 
of some good social habits turning about a belief 
that the elect were always well-dressed and lived 
in well-kept houses. They lived on the assurance 
that a rather irritable God, who was displeased 
with the Irish for their loyalty to his predecessor, 

58 



SHAW 

had presented their forefathers with the Bible as 
a legal instrument entitling them to hold all the 
best land and best jobs in the country. They 
brought up their families carefully under a code 
consisting of some of the solid old virtues merged 
in a wonderful mixture of pious practices, family 
customs, prejudices and conventions, all firmly 
bonded into a sense of their own impeccability and 
superiority. They had a general feeling that the 
existence of their God could be proved from the 
Bible, and they accepted the Ussher chronology 
and Milton's lion with his hairy mane and clay 
tail, as absolute and final truth ; they were very 
close to their ancestors of the seventeenth century. 

Shaw's parents had been moulded in their youth 
by some such upbringing and teaching into the 
standard pattern, but ideas abroad in the 'sixties 
and unfortunate events in their own lives, upset 
them. His father was a kindly, weakly man, who 
had been given a start in Hfe by influential friends, 
but he was incapable of settling down seriously to 
hard work in the flour-milling business. He was 
probably obsessed with the notion that a Kilkenny 
Shaw should not have to work — even in Wholesale. 
All his Hfe he was dogged by complexes. He 
wanted to drink, but believed that drinking was 
sinful and ruined so many promising parties by 
beginning to lament his miserable condition just 
when everyone else was getting into good form, 
that he was finally dropped socially. The man was 

59 



SHAW 

overwhelmed by the Puritan on the drink question, 
but he would not take a beating ; he popped up 
in another field and revenged himself. When 
the Puritan threatened George Carr with specially 
picked texts about the elect and the damned, he 
pointed to The Origin of Species in 1 859, and The 
Antiquity of Man in 1863, and put his fingers to his 
nose. Still, he was never very sure of himself, and 
compromised by earnestly teaching his son to 
respect the Bible and at the same time encouraging 
his ribald young efforts at higher criticism with 
uproarious laughter. 

Mrs. Shaw was made of sterner stuff. Her son 
says : " Her character reacted so strongly against 
her strict and loveless training, that churchgoing 
was completely dropped in our family before I was 
ten years old " {Prefaces, p. 633). She never seems to 
have taken any further interest in the severe teach- 
ings of her Calvinistic aunt, or to have been impelled 
to teach her son anything but love for the music 
in which she immersed herself when she became 
disappointed with her husband's feebleness, and 
disgusted with his morose conviviality. It is prob- 
able that George Carr's high and mighty attitude 
about the Shaws and their great connections bred 
in her a satirical outlook on men and their ways, 
which she unconsciously passed on to her son. 
She was a woman of strong personality and decisive 
character, and she must have exercised a multitude 
of influences of this kind, but she seems to have 

60 



SHAW 

felt little responsibility towards him, and generally 
to have left him to his own resources. 

There was no one at No. i Hatch Street to treat 
him as a boy looking out on a new and surprising 
world, or as a small person with some right to an 
intelligible explanation of why he had been invited 
into it. It was a house of grown-ups, who passed 
on their adult viewpoints to him, as if he were a 
little replica of themselves, and he was left to 
struggle as best he could to make sense of his father's 
divided counsels, his mother's cool detachment, 
his uncle William's waverings between piety and 
bathing beauties, his uncle Walter's brilliant blas- 
phemies, and the way in which a group of be- 
whiskered men could argue for hours on the pos- 
sibility of miracles, after starting with the assump- 
tion that they couldn't happen. They made no 
allowance for the fierce logic of childhood which 
was for some reason working in a more uncom- 
promising way than usual in their midst, as young 
George Bernard strove to arrange the sensations 
which were pouring in upon him, so that the real 
world would be orderly and beautiful like the 
dream worlds of his imagination. He was at last 
taking an interest in something outside himself. 
This Religion versus Science controversy which was 
spreading like wildfire in England and reflected in 
so many discussions in his home, made instant appeal 
to him. It was a dispute full of mighty drama and 
human interest, alive with the vigour of the great 

6i 



SHAW 

personalities involved, and as he listened to the 
faint echoes of it which reached Dublin, and eagerly 
read the latest proofs that the world was more than 
6,000 years old, he easily made his decision. He 
would be a champion of this fresh, vivid, certain 
knowledge against the shams and crudities of reli- 
gion. He had no experience of science, and the 
only religion of which he had inside knowledge 
was the one his family had turned down before he 
was ten, but he was full of that glorious assurance 
which has never left him. • He saw clearly facts and 
common sense on one side, and delusion and 
hypocrisy on the other, and made his choice, 
scarcely knowing at first that it was a choice. 

This matter of choice was strange. He had known 
about it vaguely for years, but about this time — 
say 1870 — his knowledge opened out into wonderful 
discovery. He found out that he was alone in a 
new and exciting way — as though George Bernard 
was floating off on his own, and had his eye on 
young Shaw. He found that he was something 
apart from his mother, father, uncles, aunts, and 
the Shaw tradition ; that he need not think as 
they thought, nor do as they did, nor even do as he 
did yesterday. He was not only new — he was free, 
and not only free to think, but to make a choice 
this way or that and to act. Just here there was a 
strangeness, for the wonderful intangible freedom 
had a direction and in some indescribable way it 
was found possible to act for, and to act against. 

62 



SHAW 

He was free and not free at the same time. He was 
in some way responsible, in some way required to 
act reasonably. He was not allowed to have all the 
fun of thinking and coming to conclusions without 
acting on them. He could, of course, turn them 
down if he liked, but it would make him uncom- 
fortable ; on the other hand, if he brought his con- 
clusions out into the open by action, there was this 
indescribable feeling of lightness, freedom, and power. 
George Bernard had discovered his conscience. 

Conscience was at a discount in those days. In 
Germany it had just been analysed as a compound 
of fear, superstition, prejudice, vanity, and custom. 
In England it was argued that it was only a spasm 
of the diaphragm like a sneeze or a cough, or else 
held to be a by-product of the social process still of 
value among primitive peoples, but no longer so 
necessary at home, owing to the British Constitu- 
tion, the Bank of England, and the Police. In 
Dalkey, Ireland, a boy was ignoring all this modern 
teaching, and beginning to experiment on himself; 
he had discovered his conscience, and was getting 
ready to back it against the world. 

Every year the Shaws sought relief from the heat, 
the dust, and the flat, flat flatness of South Dublin 
City, in a summer holiday at Dalkey. Synge 
Street and Hatch Street lie low within the curve 
of the canal, encased in dull brick fronts and 
dreadful iron-railed basements. The district is 
still a favourite gathering place for the mild mists 

63 



SHAW 

of the city, and by some trick of the atmosphere or 
the landscape, the horizon on dull days seems to 
lie at arm's length. Heaven and earth are flat- 
tened out. The very sky seems to rise out of the 
ground, and to press down on tree-tops and roofs 
like a great grey cover. By the canal, the stimulus 
of Mozart and the colour and movement of the 
Arabian Nights could only be matched by scenery 
of the imagination. At Dalkey it was different. 
To know the difference you must make a pilgrimage 
to Synge Street, walk along Heytesbury Street to 
Bride Street, look at Molyneux Church where Shaw 
received weekly instruction for a time, and then cut 
across through the slums to Stephens Green and 
Leeson Street. After that tour of a two-dimensional 
world, take a swift run to Dalkey — only eight miles 
away — and climb Torca Hill. 

Torca Cottage, where the Shaws used to stay, is 
still there, but new buildings and new walls 
make it more difficult now to wander at will about 
the summit. For the rest, there is no change since 
Druid and Danish days in the wonders of land, sea, 
and sky, that lie so lavishly around. From morning 
till night in those long summer days, a boy was 
able at last to open his eyes and see something that 
was in keeping with that incessant imperious demand 
for beauty and more beauty ; for beauty that 
would sweep and surge on, and yet be unchanged ; 
that would match his leaping imagination and yet 
stun it into breathless helplessness. . . . 

64 



SHAW 



The mail-boat harbour lies like a child's toy below. 
On the west of the hill are the two great quarries 
which built it. There is a spot above the rocky 
precipice at the end of one of them — a nice dangerous 
ledge that a boy would love. The wind comes 
brushing along the green quarry floor, meets the 
granite face, and pours wildly, escapingly, over 
that ledge, full of deep, soft, untiring music and a 
song of one word. The briar, the whitethorn, and 
the gorse that have somehow managed to find a 
home in the granite, dance wildly in the whirling 
eddies, and the hawkbit tosses hundreds of golden 
heads about, deliriously and yet deliciously in 
time with the slow beat of that throbbing word. 
Sweeping round the shoulder of Kilmashogue comes 
the wind, with all the richness gathered in the 
heather lands and cornfields of Kildare, to toss it 
up to the sky over Torca Head, and pour it down 
in wild abandonment over Killiney Bay. It is the 
busiest wind in the world, searching, sweeping, 
grooming, tidying every inch of that cliff face. 
Under the great booming organ note, there is the 
tenderest bustling hissing as it works on tendrils, 
twigs and leaves ; colour, sound and movement are 
one ; softness, wantonness, warmth, blend into 
speed and energy that mocks the anchored granite. 
Heady stuflf for a boy fresh from Shelley and brick- 
bounded streets ! 

Fifty yards away on the south slope he could sit 
on the soft turf in the shelter of a great sparkling 

65 



SHAW 



boulder and watch the sea spreading in grey-green 
lights and shadows to its twenty-mile horizon. 
The wind's music softens to the very borders of 
silence, and a murmur of surf breaking comes up 
from the white lacy frill that wavers along the 
miles of pebbly beach to Bray. Everything down 
there moves with a curious slow deliberation, as if 
by careful arrangement. The seagulls hang like 
the lightest of floating feathers, and the waves 
move on slowly to their appointed places, the lazy 
whiteness creeps monotonously up and down Kil- 
liney Strand, holding the eye, numbing the mind, 
and gripping the heart with despairing delight. 
That soft unceasing caress of land and waters is 
alive with some secret, telling it openly again and 
again, and yet hiding it maddeningly behind the 
changes which leave it ever new and unchanged. 

But the wind and the sea and the lovely sweep 
up from the strand across the vale of Shanganagh 
to the mountains beyond are all suddenly for- 
gotten playthings. Reaching down to those moun- 
tain tops is a sky which is like no other sky. It 
rises in great billowing grey rain-clouds over War 
Hill and races round the Bay in enormous curving 
shadows to change its mood to mighty piled-up 
snowy masses beyond Howth, and die away at 
last in soft pale lavender tones over Balbriggan. 
It is not one, but many skies, stormy and calm, 
cloudy and clear, endlessly blending into one 
another. The hill-top is in the midst of an airy 

66 



SHAW 

sea alive with stirring light, and full of bewildering 
variety, against that serenity of eternal blue. In 
the evening all that contrasting beauty intensifies 
and focuses about the dull furnace glow over the 
western plain ; behind Howth the towering masses 
of the day have disappeared, and a motherly sky 
is putting a sleepy land to bed with fold on fold of 
cloud, so lazily, so expertly, spread out. Above, a 
few scattered patches of silver-grey are tiredly 
trying a few last cloud measures in the dimmer and 
dimmer light. 

Down below, wandering among the gorse, young 
Bernard in his teens was embarking on his great 
venture on some such night as this. It might have 
happened anywhere, and it is possible that those 
pure, soaring, spacious skies had nothing whatever 
to do with it, but suddenly he was taking stock of 
himself, and finding, to his discomfort, that he was 
thoroughly two-faced. It was out on Torca Hill 
in the dusk of a summer's evening, when colour had 
gone from the sky, and a few slight stars were out, 
that young George Bernard suddenly found himself 
taking stock of Shaw, and urging him to mend his 
ways. He had become conscious, at last, that old 
habits did not tally with new thoughts, and he 
suddenly decided he wasn't going to have it. 
Something was forcing him to be honest and he was 
facing the issue with a primitive simplicity unknown 
to the Shaws, who always asked : " What would 
the Ponsonbys think ? " He was taking up his 

67 " . 



SHAW 



Stand on completely new ground with the query : 
" What's the good thing to do ? " The Science- 
Religion controversy which was going on about 
him with such intensity had suddenly become a 
personal issue ; he was aware at last that he had 
made a choice, and he was bringing his conscience 
to bear on it as easily and naturally as a bird flies 
when it is time for it to fly. He was saying in so 
many words : " Truth is good — religion is a sham — 
therefore religious practices are evil," and there 
and then he decided he must give up his prayers. 
It was a bit of a wrench, for he was fond of his night 
prayers, and made a feature of them in his own 
picturesque way, but he could not go on with them. 
They were magic, mockery, a bad habit, and he 
must give them up. Many a boy would have 
compromised and slowed off by degrees, but there 
was something unrelentingly scrupulous about this 
lad which made thought and action one, and there 
and then he turned his back on the God of his 
fathers. Lest there be any mistake in this descrip- 
tion of a crucial decision and the manner of it, here 
is his own story : 

I continued these pious habits long after 
the conventional compulsion to attend church 
and Sunday School had ceased, and I no longer 
regarded such customs as having anything to 
do with an emancipated spirit like mine. But 
one evening as I was wandering in the furze 
bushes on Torca Hill in the dusk, I suddenly 

68 



SHAW 

asked myself why I went on repeating my 
prayer every night, when, as I put it, I did not 
believe in it. Being thus brought to book by 
my intellectual conscience, I felt obliged in 
common honesty to refrain from superstitious 
practices ; and that night for the first time since 
I could speak, I did not say my prayers 

{Prefaces,^. ^Z3)' 

There never was a more logical man. He began 
with that fateful syllogism on Torca Hill, and from 
that day to this he has never ceased trying to fit 
himself into it ; even when he dropped materialism, 
which he did years afterwards, as promptly and 
scrupulously as he dropped his prayers, he tried to 
make a religion which would square with it — a 
religion without rules or practices. 

It is hard for the average decent Englishman to 
realise the artificiality of the conventions which 
held together the one-sided civilisation of Protestant 
Ireland in the 'seventies, and the stunning eflfect of 
the new truths which Haeckel, Spencer, Huxley and 
Tyndall v/ere preaching with such intensity and 
ability. But it is easy for everyone to delight in 
the fresh impetuous vigour with which young 
George Bernard began to use his natural gifts, trying 
to bring some order into the queer world into which 
he had been landed. He was proud of his new 
knowledge of himself, and delighted in the freedom 
and sense of power which it gave. This wonderful 
self-consciousness and exercise of his rational appetite 

69 



SHAW 

opened a new world, and he found himself looking 
curiously at others in the light of it, and embarking 
on discussions to find out what their worlds were 
like. The orthodoxy of his acquaintances rested 
on peculiar foundations, and as he probed, in 
arguments at the office and elsewhere, loss of temper 
on their part and increasing conviction on his, 
easily followed. He became more and more cool and 
certain, as they became hotter and more abusive, 
and he began to observe human behaviour with an 
increasingly critical eye. Out of his discovery of 
himself there slowly grew the further discovery 
that most men lived on their habits and prejudices, 
and didn't like being asked " Why ? '* From his 
point of view they were hardly alive at all, for 
" Why " and " Why not " were the very food of 
his life. He began to suspect all conventions, and 
found himself looking at people and events as though 
he had come from another planet and was seeing 
them for the first time. 

He had a clerical position in an estate office in 
Molesworth Street, where he carried out his duties 
punctiliously, instructed his fellow clerks in musical 
matters, and got a reputation as an atheist. In 
the early seventies he was living at 6i Harcourt 
Street, where his father had moved when the family 
broke up and his mother went to London. Outside 
the office he gave much time to music and science ; 
music he studied by listening and playing, but his 
knowledge of science was unfortunately gained 

70 



SHAW 

from books. He had no notion of what he was 
letting himself in for, nor of his complete helplessness 
in the hands of any scientific writer with a good 
style and a pet theory ; there were some wonderful 
expositors in those days, and Tyndall, who was at 
the British Association meeting in Belfast in 1874, 
was one of the best ; his presidential address was 
disturbing to many, but thrilling to his young 
admirer in Dublin. It went like this : " The mild 
light of Science breaking in upon the minds of the 
youth of Ireland is a surer check to any spiritual 
tyranny which might threaten this island than the 
laws of princes and the swords of emperors," and 
like this : "In matter we discern the promise and 
the potentiality of all terrestial life. The doctrine 
of evolution derives man in his totality from the 
interaction of organism and environment through 
countless ages past." It is hard to believe now 
that this balanced phrasing was spell-binding in 
1874, and that its confident tone carried conviction 
to millions. But in those days atoms were ultimates. 
It was useless to try to peer beyond them, for they 
were hard and unchanging — like billiard balls — 
banking up the farthest frontiers of knowledge 
with an impenetrable wall ; and anyhow, peering 
was unnecessary, for, with a limited selection of 
atoms, a few simple laws and an aeon or two, it was 
possible to show that everything came about quite 
naturally. In controversy with an obstinate oppo- 
nent the atoms could always be backed up by 

71 



SHAW 

" immutable, inexorable laws," with good effect. 
Billiards was said to be a sinful game, and it was 
pleasant for boys to be able to get a reputation for 
wickedness and at the same time have a secret 
conviction that they were being virtuous, and 
learning about the Unknowable every time they 
brought off a clever cannon. Young Bernard was 
far too serious-minded and hard-up a boy to waste 
his time at billiards, but he was giving much thought 
to cause and effect, hard facts, and the problem 
of finding rational explanations for all human 
behaviour ; his satirical feeling against the respect- 
able classes was growing and he was spoiling for a 
chance to show what was in him. He got it when 
Moody and Sankey visited Dublin, and he felt 
called to give some rational comment on revivalism. 
His letter on this matter has fortunately been rescued 
by Mr. Henderson from the copy of Public Opinion, 
dated April 3rd, 1875. 
" Sir, 

" In reply to your correspondent 'J. R. D.,' 
as to the effect of the ' wave of evangelism,' I 
beg to offer the following observations on the late 
' revival ' in Dublin, of which I was a witness. 

" As the enormous audiences drawn to the 
evangelistic services have been referred to as 
a proof of their efficacy, I will enumerate some 
of the motives which induced many persons to go. 
It will be seen that they were not of a religious, 
but a secular, not to say profane, character. 

72 



SHAW 

" Predominant was the curiosity excited by 
the great reputation of the evangelists, and the 
stories widely circulated, of the summary 
annihilation by epilepsy and otherwise of 
sceptics who had openly proclaimed their 
doubts of Mr. Moody's divine mission. 

" Another motive exhibits a peculiar side of 
human nature. The services took place in the 
Exhibition Building, the entry to which was 
connected in the public mind with the expendi- 
ture of a certain sum of money. But Messrs. 
Moody and Sankey opened the building ' for 
nothing,' and the novelty, combined with the 
curiosity, made the attraction irresistible. 

" I mention these influences particularly as I 
believe they have hitherto been almost ignored. 
The audiences were, as a rule, respectable ; and 
as Mr. Moody's orations were characterised by 
an excess of vehement assertion and a total 
absence of logic, respectable audiences were 
precisely those which were least likely to derive 
any benefit from them. 

"It is to the rough, to the outcast of the 
streets, that such ' awakenings ' should be 
addressed, and those members of the aristocracy 
who by their presence tend to raise the meetings 
above the sphere of such outcasts are merely 
diverting the evangelistic vein into channels 
where it is wasted, its place being already 
supplied, and as, in the dull routine of hard 

73 



SHAW 

work, novelty has a special attraction for the 
poor, I think it would be well for clergymen, 
who are nothing if not conspicuous, to render 
themselves so, in this instance, by their absence. 

" The unreasoning mind of the people is too 
apt to connect a white tie with a dreary church 
service, capped by a sermon of platitudes, and 
is more likely to appreciate ' the gift of the gab ' 
— ^the possession of which by Mr. Moody 
nobody will deny — than that of the Apostolic 
Succession, which he lacks. 

" Respecting the effect of the revival on 
individuals I may mention that it has a tendency 
to make them highly objectionable members 
of society, and induces their unconverted 
friends to desire a speedy reaction, which either 
soon takes place or the revived one relapses 
slowly into his previous benighted condition 
as the effect fades, and although many young 
men have been snatched from careers of 
dissipation by Mr. Moody's exhortations, it 
remains doubtful whether the change is not 
merely in the nature of the excitement rather 
than in the moral nature of the individual. 
Hoping that these remarks may elucidate 
further opinions on the subject. 

" I remain. Sir, yours, etc., 

" S." 
His age was just eighteen years and eight months. 



74 



CHAPTER IV 

The writer of that letter was clearly not the stuff 
that elderly estate clerks are made from, and it is 
not surprising to find him dropping his job in the 
following year and going to live with his mother 
and sister in London. He was ill at ease in Dublin 
in more ways than one. He had probably missed 
his mother's company, her music and her clear- 
headed common sense more than he realised ; he 
didn't like office work, and he wanted to escape 
before it closed about him permanently as a means 
of livelihood ; he was a very conscientious young 
Atheist trying to reconcile a sincere behef that he 
was entirely due to molecules and immutable law, 
with a keen sense of humour, and it was difficult 
for him to find congenial company. He probably 
didn't know quite what he wanted. The story that 
he went to London to become a writer, because 
London is the hub of the world in which the English 
language is used, seems thin, and it is likely that 
he was as mixed in his motives for actions as a young 
man of twenty generally is, and made the break 
mainly because he wanted something to happen, 
and knew that it wouldn't, so long as he remained 
in Dublin. 

75 



SHAW 

He had entered the land office at the age of fifteen 
as an office boy, and carried out duties of increasing 
responsibility for four and a half years, to the com- 
plete satisfaction of his employer. He was in a 
position to learn much about land, money and credit, 
but the transactions of commerce didn't interest 
him any more than the swiftly-changing political 
drama going on about him. An acre of land and 
its meaning in terms of potatoes or fodder had no 
significance for him, rent was just something 
difficult to collect, and money just a row of figures 
in a ledger. His work was so much grind pains- 
takingly done, and outside of it there was art — 
music, pictures, books — to stir and delight his 
ardent young mind, and give him more and more 
food for speculation about men and women, and 
their gifts, activities and relationships to one another. 
He was an efficient clerk with no more interest in 
the machine he was helping to operate than the 
average motorist has in cam design. He didn't 
even know it was a machine, though he was uncon- 
sciously gaining exact experience of it, and storing 
up at first hand the knowledge which was to be 
unleashed with such stark effect in Widowers^ 
Houses. He didn't know that he was a child trying 
to live in a world of commerce and investment 
which had no use for new life. 

London in 1876 was the very centre of that world. 
Enterprises of every kind converged there in search 
of credit, and spread out in practical form over the 

76 



SHAW 

seas of the world. Iron ships, barely known in 
1850, were steaming everywhere, speeding up 
interchanges, cutting costs and multiplying profits. 
England was building them, manning them, coaling 
them, and filHng them with the cargoes of manu- 
factured goods for which those countries which had 
managed to line their pockets with London loans, 
were crying out. Investments abroad rose from 
£230,000,000 in 1850 to j(^i, 200,000,000 in 1875. 
To the Forsytes of those days it seemed that all the 
ages of the world were but a preparation for this 
great age of Victoria, and that at last in their life- 
time, mankind, with England well in the van, had 
arrived at a suitable resting-place, fair and level, 
after the painful upward struggle of centuries. 
Some of the highbrow Forsytes could even look back 
in the light of the new knowledge, over dim stretches 
of millions of years, and breathe grateful acknow- 
ledgments to the amoeba, the first fish, and the last 
superlative monkey for their various contributions 
to this wonderful condition of assured prosperity 
and established security. They easily passed to the 
stage of looking on their possessions and institutions 
as the final fruit of the evolutionary effort of the 
ages, and strove with every domestic and political 
nerve to establish themselves permanently in their 
thickly draped, heavily furnished, tremendously solid 
homes. Young Soames Forsyte was taught the 
doctrine of property by the very canopy on his 
cradle, and the way his uncles spoke to their wives. 

77 



SHAW 

The Prime Minister, Disraeli, who understood 
London business men even better than he under- 
stood the Queen, was giving them every help that 
could be expected from a practical politician. His 
shrewdness about the Suez Canal had brought him 
great prestige. Bankers, shipping companies, eastern 
traders, and the great investing pubHc loved him, 
and the London Press was solidly behind him. But 
he had to be friendly with Turkey, and the position 
became very involved when Achmet Aga was 
decorated by the Sultan for burning twelve hundred 
Christians ahve in a church. Gladstone " came 
back" with a pamphlet, Bulgarian Horrors and the 
Question of the East, which was bought up at once 
through the country, but coldly received in the 
House of Commons, where all those with even a 
remote financial interest in the East thought the 
time for action inopportune. Domestic affairs in 
the Balkans were the topic of the day, and subjects 
like housing conditions in Lancashire were never 
even mentioned ; everyone knew the meaning of 
bashi-bazouk, but the meaning of back- to-back houses 
was only known to landlords and building con- 
tractors. Atrocities abroad were more exciting than 
rickets at home, and Turkey held the centre of the 
stage till suddenly, in 1878, the Glasgow Bank failed 
for ;f 6,000,000 and bankruptcy and unemployment 
spread over the whole country in the great slump of 
1879. The eyes of England came back from the 
ends of the earth ; the Forsytes and their factory 

78 



SHAW 

managers, hard driven by even harder driven bank 
managers, said : " Business as usual," and made 
ends meet by discharging surplus employees, cutting 
wages and extending hours, and the " lower classes " 
saved the country's credit by tightening their belts 
and living on the edge of starvation for a year. But 
their marvellous good nature was badly strained, 
and some patient murmurs were rising ; they were 
rather confused and illiterate murmurs, for the 
population had risen from sixteen to twenty-four 
millions in twenty-five years, and there was no 
money left for schools and teachers when 
3(^970,000,000 had been spent abroad. The 
murmurs from below might have died away, or 
been choked out, had they not been joined by 
some terrific roars from above, from men neither 
patient nor illiterate ; Ruskin's outpourings were 
beginning to tell, Morris was getting so wild at the 
growing ughness about him that he could think of 
nothing but blowing it all up in one glorious explo- 
sion, Marx had written a book half full of terrible 
indisputable facts about industrialism, which a few 
men were beginning to read. But the polite world 
paid little attention to these people. 

In 1880 Gladstone was back in the saddle. He 
wanted to do something to help the " lower 
classes" ; they were so patient and good-natured, 
and it was a shame to see so many of them starving 
and diseased. But he didn't get a chance to attend 
to England. In Ireland the polite world had been 

79 



SHAW 

trying to keep the fashionable pace set in London 
without having any foreign orders for cotton goods, 
coal or locomotives to help them, and the *' lower 
classes " had lost their good nature and were 
beginning to shoot ; worse still, Irish members 
were beginning to be guilty of grave indecorum in 
the House of Commons. Parnell was coming into 
power. He had entered the House in 1875 in the 
same cool, appraising way that Shaw entered 
London a year later ; he had seen Joe Biggar 
obstructing public business in a villainous way ; 
he had heard him say, "Butt's a fool. He's too 
gentlemanly. We are all too gentlemanly," and he 
had immediately agreed with Biggar. Public 
opinion was shocked — a quiver of horror ran round 
the Stock Exchange — London editors exchanged 
significant looks — a young man had come into the 
English House of Parliament for the first time, and 
was not impressed. 

In five years Butt had gone under, saying, " I am 
not in favour of a policy of exasperation," and 
Parnell, rising to leadership on the wings of that 
policy, was making the Irish question hum. Since 
1850 tenants had been making mild protests against 
starvation. Their leaders had begun by saying 
" Property has its duties as well as its rights," and 
been rebuked by an English peer for preaching 
Communism. They continued to go on in this 
cautious, good-humoured way till, in 1878, Michael 
Davitt, a man from Mayo who had been given 

80 



SHAW 



years for reflection in Dartmoor Gaol, came out 
with a slogan that settled the whole question. 
Once he stood up at Irishtown in 1879 ^-nd said, 
" The land for the people," the game was up. 
Everyone knows what happened next, and it is all 
another story. 

The important point here is that while the stage 
was being set during the period 187 6- 1880 for the 
Imperialist, Labour, Irish and Socialist struggles 
which followed, young Shaw, at the very centre of 
affairs, took no real interest in it. The political 
situations at home and abroad were full of dramatic 
tension, and were a common topic in all circles, 
the newspapers of the time were full of them ; yet 
— in these four years, between the ages of twenty 
and twenty-four — he ignored public affairs. It 
wasn't that he didn't notice them : he noticed 
everything. Nor that he was preoccupied with 
efforts to earn his living : the only thing he feared 
was that some influential friend might lure him into 
a job. Nor that he was busy looking after his 
mother and sister : emotional domesticities were 
unknown in the Shaw home. Nor that he was 
seeing life with some of the lads : he had no money, 
and, anyhow, could he have stood their company 
and they his ? No, he took no interest in the worlds 
of business or politics, not because of minor distrac- 
tions, but because he was preoccupied with some- 
thing vastly more impressive and exciting than the 
magnificence of Gladstone or the manoeuvres of 

81 ^ 



SHAW 

Bismarck. He was wondering what he would do 
about George Bernard Shaw. 

The fellow was a tremendous responsibility. 
Every baby knows that he is important. He is born 
with that conviction and carries it with him till such 
time as it is harnessed, or enslaved, or deformed by 
matter-of-fact elders with an eye to the main chance, 
or by murderous mass output educational systems 
designed to mould him to a particular pattern and 
produce a social unit which will not ask questions or 
" cause trouble." George Bernard had not been 
properly moulded, and that primary intuition had 
not been blotted out or obscured by some small-scale 
political or financial ambition. It roamed all over 
the place, and though occasionally toying with the 
notion of outclassing Michael Angelo, it preferred 
not to be tied down by any limitations. He was, 
in fact, George Bernard and Company, Unlimited, 
and the Company was stupendous. Bunyan was 
jostling Michael Angelo, Huxley and Helmholtz 
were crowding on top of Shakespeare and Beethoven, 
Dickens and Wagner were trying to make themselves 
at home, Shelley had come to stay. At first it was 
enough to be entertained and to soar off on the 
wings of each of them in turn ; he and the artist 
and the delights unfolded were one. But later these 
men and the wonders they made became elusive, 
at one moment he possessed them, and they him, 
and the next they were apart and remote, outside of 
him and inaccessible. More puzzling still, he him- 

82 



SHAW 

self Split up, he could read and roam with Al Raschid 
and at the same time look back curiously from 
Baghdad at the boy in Hatch Street turning over 
the pages with such eager intensity ; he used to 
wonder which was which. He had found that he 
could get outside and look at himself; he could 
think about his thoughts. He suddenly knew 
piercingly that he was himself, that in all time there 
had never been anything like him. He knew he 
was new ; the intuition had come out into the open, 
he had been right all along, he was indeed something 
marvellous . . . like every other boy. They all 
know it at times, but he knew it more steadily and 
keenly than most, and he would not let that glorious 
vision fade ; with him it became every day fresher 
and more enthralling. 

He was wildly curious and gradually began to 
turn himself into that miraculous microscope in 
which he was at once the observer, the instrument, 
and the specimen. Usually George sat stiff, serious, 
intense at the eyepiece, and Bernard lay on the slide 
kicking up his heels ; he was always amused at 
George's attempts to get clear definition and finality. 
George was the organiser and looked down soberly, 
saying : "If you don't mind your step, you can't 
see where you are going," and the other tumbled 
about on his back chuckling : " If you don't look up 
you can't see at all." 

He knew he was important with a simplicity of 
knowing which defies all trite and laborious analysis. 

83 



SHAW 

The conviction was not wrapped up in any particular 
aim or accomplishment like climbing Everest or 
sinking all ten-foot putts. It would have been just 
as intense had he been alone in his shirt on a raft 
in mid-ocean. It was no matter of assessment, 
depending upon some particular power ; it didn't 
mean that he was more important than anyone else, 
it had nothing to do with outside things or people, 
it was sheer primal certainty. He was as sure of it 
as he was puzzled by it, and as determined to express 
it openly in some way as he was conscious of his 
absurd limitations. Linked with his conviction, 
almost identical with it, there was that intense 
sensitive scrupulousness. He would not do routine 
clerical work because it was a waste of himself, 
yet when he was trapped into a job he performed his 
duties most punctiliously lest he take wages which 
were not fully due to him. He must preserve his 
identity, his sense of himself, his freedom, at all costs, 
and to this end he scrutinised all his actions, pouncing 
unmercifully on all unworthy motives, and trying 
with all the earnestness of his twenty-one pure and 
fervent years to be a perfectly rational being. 

He was for ever trying to see what it was all about, 
and particularly what he was for. It had seemed 
clearer in Dublin as he graduated amid the concerts, 
the bookstalls, the picture galleries and the skies of 
Torca Hill. Now, taking his post-graduate course 
in the reading-room of the British Museum, in the 
London parks and galleries, and in various musical 

84 



SHAW 

drawing-rooms, he became less assured, but no less 
determined to use himself mightily in some way. 
That was what all those great ones had done, and 
he wanted to be like them, or rather — for imitation 
was anathema — to do something which would make 
him of their company. He didn't want to be like 
anyone but George Bernard Shaw, who was now, 
after a year or two in London, getting restless 
because nothing was being done about him. He 
was chock-full of booklearning, miscellaneous sensa- 
tions, and wild fancies ; of theories about music, 
painting, and literature ; and he was simmering with 
the excitements of his microscopic research on him- 
self and others. There was nothing for it but to write 
a book. At worst it would give George and Bernard 
some regular occupation and an outlet, and keep 
them from wrecking their prim Shaw-Gurly home. 
The book was finished in 1 879. It is a remarkable 
work of 140,000 words, every one of them selected 
with the greatest care and neatly fitted in place ; 
on every page is stamped this impression of sentences 
deliberately chosen word by word to etch a special 
shade of meaning, and marshalled as carefully as 
the figures in a ledger. After an opening reminiscent 
of Dickens, he settles down to work in a way com- 
pletely his own ; he writes to no model, he has, in 
his sweet innocence or insolent independence, no 
publisher or pubhc in view ; he is not writing a novel 
for sale ; he is making a work of art. It is an 
amazing book. It is like a picture in which the 

85 



SHAW 



artist worked from top to bottom, putting in every 
object he had ever seen with faithful skill ; or like 
the first lesson given by a new teacher who covers 
the session's syllabus in a single hour. It is full of 
himself at his most threefold, eagerly filling the 
stage, cautiously prompting from the wings and 
critically scoffing from the stalls. He ranges every- 
where, producing a curious impression of time 
running backwards in a sort of inverted condensed 
recapitulation, with the theme of Major Barbara 
dimly appearing and Jack Tanner struggling for 
utterance. It is quite unreadable in the ordinary 
way, for nothing happens, and the characters slip 
in and out of focus all the time ; but it is full of 
interest, for it tells what George Bernard Shaw was 
thinking about in 1878. 

He brings characters on and off, for the sole 
purpose of reviewing his interests, discussing his 
problems and lecturing on his conclusions ; they 
deliver themselves in mighty conversational mouth- 
fuls two pages at a time (he must have loved pouring 
out his opinions like this from the day he learnt to 
handle a pen). He covers every ordinary human 
interest — sex, art, and religion predominating ; 
science is treated with what might almost be 
described as deference, and it would appear that the 
doctrine of the man from the molecule has been 
accepted as basic truth beyond discussion. He 
launches out early with an attack on evangelicalism : 
" there arose a young man, earnest and proud of his 

86 



SHAW 

oratory, who offered up a long prayer in the course of 
which he suggested such modifications in the laws of 
nature as would bring the arrangement of the uni- 
verse into conformity with his own tenets," and there- 
after sallies on similar lines dot the pages. Towards 
the end there is a study of a neurotic convert to 
Catholicism ; the attack on revealed religion is 
naively made against a weak and tottering opposition 
and it is clear that he is trying to deal fairly with 
some typical supporters of a fast vanishing supersti- 
tion. His manner with the types he introduces is 
olympian, he presents them with the urbane detach- 
ment and serene amusement of a Chinese philos- 
opher ; there is not a trace of arrogance, not a single 
spiteful reference, as he sets his pious people on their 
feet and puts them through their pre-determined 
paces ; he respects the individuality of his cardboard 
creations ever at their feeblest. 

There are solid slabs of discussion on literature, 
painting and music, which have nothing to do with 
the story and throw it out of balance with weight 
of unexpected expert knowledge. Music is alv/ays 
touched with a sure hand, and there is a studiously 
speculative interest in painting with some leaning 
towards Italian Primitives. For the rest, it is 
evident that the bookshelves of the British Museum 
were being ransacked daily for light on the heretics, 
critics, and querists of the past. Some of the 
discussions between the principals, Robert Smith 
and Harriet Russell, are less concerned with their 

87 



SHAW 

affairs than with the author's latest dip into Rousseau 
or La Rochefoucauld. 

Robert and Harriet are real people in a peculiar 
way. They move through imaginary scenes and 
situations with the stiffness of mechanical toys, but 
every now and then there is a spurt of vitality. 
Robert stands out clearly and contradictorily, at once 
puzzled and confident, lost in self-consciousness and 
acutely observant. It is the picture of a very young 
genius painted by himself, which will live as long as 
Man and Superman. Harriet is a mystery woman ; 
Robert is restless, but she barely moves ; every time 
she speaks, someone is flattened out. As the Scotch 
dressmaker of the story, she is hopeless, but as a 
series of oracular protests against males and their 
ways, she is very much alive. Listen to her sizing up 
Robert : " You are clever enough to argue for all 
you do, and I fear that is all the good your cleverness 
will ever be to you." It sounds very much like Mrs. 
Shaw's voice here and again in the wonderful sum- 
ming up at the end : " You are not a boy ; and you 
are not grown-up. Some day you will get away from 
your books and come to know the world and get 
properly set. But just now there is no doing any- 
thing with you. You are just a bad case of imma- 
turity." Robert replies from his heart : "I never 
could feel grown-up ; and I believe you were born 
grown-up. I am afraid I am incurable." 

The trouble about Robert was that no one ever 
called him Bob, he was at once too young and too 

88 



SHAW 

old, and he would ask such queer questions ; even 
when he was courting, his curiosity got the better 
of him. " Are you fond of dressmaking? " asked 
Smith, wishing to discover how far she had the 
feeHng of an artist about her work. The courtship 
naturally failed, and later on, when the flirtation with 
the Irish girl fizzled out, he " v/ent his way enjoying 
the prospect of a long respite from further love- 
making, and very far from realising the ineptitude 
with which he had conducted it." 

It is all very well to smile at this now and say, 
*' Good old G.B.S.," but imagine the reactions of 
the first forty publishers to whom Immaturity was 
offered, as they tried to make some sense out of this 
dexterous double-crossing. They may have been 
interested in the strange Irish stew, but they had 
their market to think about, and they knew with the 
certainty of British business men of the seventies, 
that the public did not want mutton, horns and 
hoofs on the one dish. It was bad enough to have 
several different kinds of lovemaking in a book, 
and to poke fun at all of them, but there was worse : 
beneath the most ordinary incidents in the most 
sedate places there was a continuous play of sly 
stabs and jeers at a social stratification which every 
English writer of the day accepted as his frame of 
reference. It was not that these writers were dull 
or timid, or particularly pious. Swinburne's 
whipped cream lyrics were making the under- 
graduates dizzy, Meredith was writing The Egoist, 

89 



SHAW 

and R. L. S. was travelling with a donkey in the 
Cevennes in 1878 ; Arnold and Tennyson were sleek 
enough perhaps, but Garlyle and Butler were not ; 
Hardy, Eliot, Trollope, and Reade were writing 
at the top of their form ; there was plenty of variety 
and plenty of criticism, subtle and otherwise, and all 
kinds of authors, including Ouida and Mayne Reid, 
could find a market, on one condition. They must 
always make dukes talk like dukes, and coachmen 
behave like coachmen. They might, and did, make 
earls fall in love with dressmakers, but the dress- 
maker must know her place. The earl might be 
brutal or beneficent, but not in one book and under 
the same name. Every character had to be true to 
type and the types to be clearly defined ; literary 
matter had to have a firm British background to be 
marketable. Even Erewhon (1872) and The Egoist 
(1879) filled this bill. For the strength of Butler's 
satire came in the first place from his intensely 
English classical education, and Meredith hid his 
onslaught under cover of the English landscape, 
spacious parks, cherry blossoms and fine wine. 

It was all very well for a finished craftsman to 
pass oflf one anomaly decked out with the usual 
furnishings, and surrounded by footmen and fashion- 
able figures, but it was another thing for an unknown 
to oflfer the publishers a book full of Sir Willoughbys 
in the raw. There was a good market for moralising, 
however awkward, or for ingenious impiety, or for 
almost any kind of writing on artistic matters, but 

90 



SHAW 

there was none for a novel in which introspection 
and motive analysis played about the actions of 
every single character and made tatters of the story. 
Shaw couldn't see the play for the actors. He 
couldn't allow his people to take a step without 
calling attention to the muscle contraction which 
made it possible, and he would turn aside from their 
clothes and carriages on the slightest excuse, to skin 
them alive and probe for nerves. He did not know 
how to use his gift with moderation, and his book 
was like nothing on earth. 

He scarcely understood how strange and vaguely 
disturbing was this dissecting-room style. He had 
known all along that it was an extraordinary thing 
to be alive, but he was only beginning to find that 
it was mighty awkward as well — for he did not 
seem to fit. There were so many lovely things to 
feel and so many delightful things to think about, 
but no one else seemed to bother with them, or 
even to notice they were there. The others seemed 
to be like him — they had bodies and faces, and two 
feet and so on — but inside they were diflferent. 
They had ears, for instance, and they couldn't hear. 
Music hardly seemed to affect them at all, and they 
were able to tolerate dreadful performances and even 
to murmur lying appreciations of them. It was 
difficult to make any kind of contact with these 
people, for when asked some perfectly simple ques- 
tion about themselves, they were offended and turned 
away, or else looked at him as if he had said some- 

91 



SHAW 

thing indecent. He spoke English, yet he was 
unable to get into communication with them. 
There was some kind of a rush going on, which was 
deeply concerned with food and clothes, shops and 
ships, shares and banks. He was no dreamer (he 
says he was, but don't mind him), he saw the use of 
all these things as clearly as you do, but he was 
perfectly sure that they were not what he wanted. 
As he said to his friend Harriet, " Suppose you enjoy 
yourself more in keeping out of the rush than scramb- 
ling in it ? " Robert Smith was always putting 
up questions like that — not as concealed assertions 
but as genuine " Why nots " demanding sensible 
answers — and the questions cut across the very core 
of the conventions which held the 1870's together. 

He was asking them not as a philosopher or 
sociologist, but as a matter of immediate and 
intimate interest to his author, who wanted to know 
what he was for, and whether there was any reason 
why he should do one thing more than another. 
If he enjoyed watching, why should he work? 
If he enjoyed one particular kind of activity, why 
should he undertake another ? He must have been 
told by everyone, " Because there's no money in it," 
but that was no use. He wasn't asking " Where is 
money ? " but " Why are men ? " There must be 
some reason for them — or was life unreasonable ? 
He was prepared to consider that, for purposes of 
argument, but privately this was the one point on 
which Bernard was obstinate and intolerant. On 

92 



SHAW 

everything else he had an open mind, but, by God, 
if the world wasn't reasonable it had better look out. 
He would lick it into shape if he had to do it single- 
handed. That German might try to get people to 
lie down and die, but this young sprig of an Irish- 
man was going to stand up and live ; he wouldn't 
say die while grass grew or water ran. 

Immaturity was rejected unanimously, but that 
didn't matter. He was twenty-three and able to 
see through everything and everybody. There was 
a fascination about writing ; he enjoyed creating 
characters, giving them their heads for a few pages, 
and then taking them apart. The writing of his 
first book had only whetted his appetite. It had 
taught him many things ; among others that he 
could not make a novel by following his fancy all 
over the place. He must get some central idea and 
stick to it. His second novel. The Irrational Knot, 
was the result. It is a study of mating and marriage 
seen through the eyes of a two-fisted Irish- American 
named Edward Connolly. The shy, tentative Smith 
with his Peter Pannish charm vanishes, and this 
new hero comes on, with his jaw set, to study the 
manoeuvres of Man and Woman in three modes. 
He starts one hundred per cent materialist, telling all 
the other characters one by one where they get off. 
The book is like the first in its isolation of individuals 
from one another and from a background. Every- 
one is considered by himself and on his own merits. 
There are no principles, only pictures of people 

93 



SHAW 

and events. There is a central theme but no 
central theory. And there is far too much micro- 
scope. Connolly knows too much. Even his creator 
can't stand such a god-almighty man for four 
hundred pages, and gets a woman to give him a 
trimming about page 250. Towards the end he 
softens mysteriously, and the downright deter- 
minism begins to curl up at the edges. He begins 
to murmur to himself, " I am for the fullest attainable 
life," and to have his doubts about " Liberty." 
George Bernard had got tired of rationalistic analysis 
and snapshotting. It did not get him anywhere. 
It gave him a sense of power for a time, and it was 
fun to drop Connolly into the middle of an 1880 
drawing-room and watch him blow up, but that 
was not enough. 

He was no farther forward after writing two books. 
He had tried the discursive method with Bernard 
in the lead, and he had tried the crowbar method 
with George throwing his weight about, but neither 
satisfied him. He felt as important as ever, but he 
couldn't get started. His conscience would not let 
him settle down to work and help to support his 
mother and sister. He had turned matters over 
thoroughly in 300,000 carefully written words ; he 
had read nearly all the books in the British Museum, 
and he had observed people in and out of doors 
with the greatest attention ; and he asked himself 
why they were all going on like this after umpteen 
million years. It was incredible, it was madden- 

94 



S H A W 

ingly mysterious, it was wildly funny — for they were 
all so concerned about trifles — so carried off their 
feet with their love-fancies. He saw through all 
those. They were just a trick which kept the show 
going on, and what was the use of keeping it going if 
it didn't mean anything. Perhaps the German was 
right. No, to hell with him ! Life was for good, it 
must be for beauty too. There was a clue here, dim 
and elusive, but worth following. And when he 
saw anything worth following he followed it promptly 
and for all he was worth. 

Music, painting, poetry, were the best things. 
They were permanent beauty caught and crystal- 
lised out of life. They were the only thing worth 
while. So his next book was Love among the Artists. 
There is no need to follow him through it to Cashel 
Byron's Profession, written in 1882, and on to The 
Unsocial Socialist, his last attempt at novel writing, 
completed in 1883; for after 1881 genuine free 
thinking slackened, and the outlines of the new 
creed began to appear. He went on writing all 
this time apparently without the slightest hope of 
publication. He began Immaturity about 1877 and 
finished his fifth book in 1883. Nearly a million 
words and not one carelessly written sentence ! It 
was a wonderful apprenticeship. It was no mere 
mechanical training, but an orgie of furious thinking, 
at least up to 1883. After that there was no more 
speculative thought but only more and more furious 
propaganda. 

95 



SHAW 

From this time Art was his rehgion, and Shelley 
was its prophet. He had that " intuitive per- 
ception of the underlying analogies, the secret 
subterranean passages between matter and soul '* 
which transcend scientific thinking. Men like him — 
Blake, Goethe, and the rest — could pluck out rich 
glowing meanings from the heart of labouring 
Nature and create new truth. Man's destiny was 
to go upward from plane to plane of knowledge 
through greater and greater appreciation of beauty. 
And the great ones of the world were the creative 
artists who could hew out fresh models from this 
amorphous world which was surging aimlessly at 
the mercy of itself and had only man to rely on for 
further progress. Some such ideas had been floating 
in the upper intellectual airs of Europe for a century. 
They had drifted north from France, and come to 
earth in the German universities. Soon they were 
spreading out to fire young imaginations and fuse 
themselves into the work of the artists of all coun- 
tries. Wagner was caught by them. There had 
been a riot in Paris in 1 86 1 over Tannhduser — ^for the 
professional critics made trouble at first — but 1876 
saw the Ring at Bayreuth and in 1880 the new operas 
were startling and fascinating listeners by the 
thousand. He was winning everywhere, and his 
theories, his genius and his themes swept young 
Shaw off his feet and whirled him into the twentieth 
century waving the banner of Creative Evolution. 

But not quite. It will not do to rush things like 

96 



SHAW 

this. Perhaps in another thousand years, when the 
half century 1880 to 1930 looks like a passing hour, 
it may be possible to compress Wagner and Shaw 
into a sentence or two, and see clearly how much 
of the thought of nineteenth-century England was 
made in Germany. Just now it is enough to know 
that this new drama with its blend of sound, words, 
movement and scene, into one harmonic whole, 
was a revelation to the young listener tuned to 
perfection for appreciation of just such a display. 

It was clear that art was all-important, and that 
artists were the salt of the earth, but that was not 
enough. Shaw never had much use for generalities. 
He needed something definite, concrete, and per- 
sonal, and it was here that Samuel Butler and the life 
cell came in. Butler was a man who had been in 
and out of the Church of England as Shaw had 
been in and out of the Church of Ireland, except 
that Butler had been in longer and deeper. Like 
Shaw too, he had a devouring passion for order 
and honour, and was intensely sensitive to the 
oddities of human conduct. He was full of the 
evolutionary spirit of the times, and was being 
tripped up at every point by the non-negotiability 
of the results of a classical education, just as Shaw 
was being harassed by his failure to sell his artistic 
knowledge. He had gone to New Zealand to try 
to make a living, and he had come home to try to 
teach the English people how to live. He was not 
satisfied with Darwin ; he felt that man could not 

97 



SHAW 

live on rocks alone, however rich their record, 
and he wanted to prove this to the pubhc. He had 
a remarkable gift of expressing himself in clean, 
lean English. When he sighted hypocrisy he was 
swift and ruthless as a greyhound. 

Butler was fascinated by the life cell. Lenses had 
improved, and the foundations of cytology were 
being laid in Germany. In 1861 the cell was 
defined as " a small mass of protoplasm endowed 
with the attributes of life." That was fine ; delight 
greeted the discovery that there were two simple 
ultimates from which the inorganic and organic 
worlds were built up. The millions of years of the 
geologists and the billions of miles of the astronomers 
had been hard to bear, but now that it was known 
that everything was made from such teeny-weeny 
bits, everyone was reassured. The only thing that 
remained was to find a formula for the cell. It was 
here that Butler jibbed, for he didn't want it to have 
a formula ; he loved the simple cell, and its way of 
dividing up and yet remaining itself, so that it seemed 
to live for ever. He read more and more about it, 
and seemed to see clearly how the cell by striving, 
developed itself and passed these developments to its 
offspring. He became its champion, and defended it 
against all comers. The cell was, in its own way, an 
individual, and must not be treated as a tiny 
machine. It had a will and a memory ; otherwise 
how could it adapt itself so well to outside changes, 
and pass on good habits to its children. That 

98 



S H AW 

Will was the essence of life. It was a Sacred Mystery ; 
and Butler rapped the knuckles of every pawing 
materialist that tried to lay a hand on it. Further- 
more, this elemental unit of life had learned to 
assemble itself in masses, some of which had charm- 
ing habits, like a rose-bush, and others shocking 
habits, like a tiger. Further up the scale came 
Homer and further still Handel. The cell, with its 
urge and its wonderful assembly of habits, had made 
man that man might create higher and still higher 
forms of beauty, and the emotions and sense of 
importance which man felt rising within him were 
the cell's message to him from the past, and its own 
mystic urge towards the future. 

Butler's teaching was the link which Shaw needed 
to bind together what he saw without and felt within. 
But he did not take over Butler or Wagner without 
question, any more than he took over Herder or 
Goethe or Schopenhauer without looking them coolly 
in the eye as who should say, "I'm Bernard Shaw 
from Dublin, and this is the year 1882. If I can't 
improve on you, I have no cellular tissue." If there 
was anything worthwhile in this cell business (and 
Bernard had his doubts) , and in this warning within 
to take himself seriously, it was that he must not 
rest content with what others had done, but jump 
right into the middle of things and act. 

The world must be made fit for artists to work in. 
There was no use writing novels, or composing 
operas, or making beautiful things, when the world 

99 



SHAW 

did its best to starve those who made them. He had 
real fellow-feeling with Wagner and Butler here, for 
his fourth novel came back from the publishers just 
as regularly as the others. But he didn't weep over 
himself. In fact, by this time it looks as though he 
had almost lost sight of himself in his concern for 
Art and the Artists who were to come. 

When after about five years in London he began 
to take an active interest in the social organisation 
about him, he found that he was not the only one 
who objected to its petrified stratification, and that 
from all angles men and women were coming 
together to fight. They did not know what they 
were up against, or how to tackle it, and they 
were making the wildest attacks on people and 
things without any plan whatever. Bradlaugh was 
one focus ; Hyndman was another ; he had met 
Marx, swallowed him whole, and produced a 
pamphlet called England for All in 1881. William 
Morris didn't have to read anything ; he wasn't 
like the bookworms, he was a manual worker, and 
he knew without reading. He just knew. He didn't 
require statistics or philosophy to tell him that 
England was in a mess. He was a simple man 
and he wanted a simple cure like a huge hose or 
a big bomb. There were others linked with 
Hyndman and Morris in the Democratic Federation 
in 1883, and all were in perfect agreement about 
everything, except what they wanted and the way 
to get it. In no time at all there was a fine old split, 

lOQ 



SHAW 

and Morris budded oflf in a separate Socialist League. 
By 1884 English Socialism was going ahead wildly 
in all directions, and proving nothing except that it 
was very difficult to get a group of free-thinking 
Englishmen to work together for any length of time, 
for any purpose whatever. 

The intellectuals had tried to combine with the 
miners and dockers to make a way of escape from 
ugliness and starvation, and they found themselves 
getting on one another's nerves. Even the arrange- 
ment of meetings and the selection of speakers gave 
trouble. Fresh young newcomers were eager to 
pick holes in any policy that was more than a month 
old, and were confident that the better a man was 
dressed the greater and wiser he was. Later on Shaw 
said, " the combination of the petulant rich man with 
the ignorant poor one is perhaps the most des- 
perately unworkable on the political chessboard." 
It is easy to see this in retrospect. The remarkable 
thing is that he could see it at the time, and threw in 
his lot from the very beginning with the first group 
to become eflfective and to force the pace. He was a 
live member of the Fabian Society from its formation 
in 1 884. He came into the middle of that struggling, 
milling mass of uplifters — a raw youth without a 
particle of experience of politics, committee work 
or propaganda — saw clearly what was wrong, and 
steered himself straight into the best position for 
the purpose he had in view. It was a triumph for 
the habit of meditation, observation, and more 

lOI 



SHAW 



meditation. He had lived in seclusion for years ; 
he had fastened on two points, one an assumption 
and the other an intuition ; and henceforward he 
followed them wherever they led him with Euclidean 
rationahty and Cromwellian zeal. For eight years 
the world had tried to flatten him out, and had then 
suddenly turned and handed him the Fabian Society 
— a toy for his delight. 



102 



CHAPTER V 

He had been in the wilderness for six years — there 
is no more desolate place in the world than London 
for a sensitive young man who doesn't like it and 
won't give in. Till 1882 he never questioned the 
permanence of the social structure about him, not 
even when he was poking his fingers through its ribs. 
He girded against the aesthetic ignorance of the rich, 
but he accepted them as he accepted bad weather. 
He saw that money could always be made by 
certain cunning activities, but it did not seem that 
this could be changed any more than that the 
Thames could be made to run uphill. Some men 
were greedy and got rich as bladders filled, others 
weren't money-tight and stayed poor as sieves 
leaked, and that was all there was to it. The forces 
which produced riches and poverty were all part 
of a regardless and unalterable environment. 

One day — September 5th, 1882 — his curiosity 
brought him to hear Henry George lecturing on 
Land and Rent, and he suddenly saw past the people 
into the system about him. He saw, of course, in 
his own way. That is to say, in a very simple, 
fiercely analytical, terrifically honest way. And he 
reacted as usual by immediate action. He had been 

103 



SHAW 

seeing through people for years, now he suddenly 
saw through the system. It was as though a vision 
had suddenly appeared in a bank of fog — or rather 
as if the world of men and property had turned into 
a sketch-book, in which all the pictures told the same 
jerky little story : 

All wealth from land, 

All rent from wealth, 

Property is theft. 

The tenant works but doesn't own, 
The landlord owns but doesn't work, 
Property is theft. 

The more the men, 
The less the land. 
The richer the landlord, 
The poorer the rest, 
Property is theft. 

He had been ill at ease in the City, but he had 
assumed that London was inevitable and that he 
had no choice between going on being unhappy, or 
selling himself cheap and joining in the scramble. 
Now he found that London was not a natural 
product, but an artificial institution — in fact, a den 
of thieves. He had been right all along in holding 
out against it. His intuition has not misled him. 
His confusions and uncertainties were suddenly 
resolved by this new analysis ; all his dislikes and 
longings, all his experiences in the Dublin estate 
office suddenly coalesced about the phrase " Property 
is theft," and London blazed in a new and lurid 

104 



SHAW 

light. It was the core of a lying world. His ill-ease 
disappeared in a flash before the idea that the 
environment could be changed. He was filled with 
tingling conviction. It was right to fight. 

It was characteristic of him to realise that all his 
knowledge was useless till he knew more of 
economics. He came away from that Progress and 
Poverty meeting, and settled down to read Marx 
and study economics, as an ambitious artist studies 
anatomy. It is well to note here that this sudden 
change of activity was no abnormal break, but a 
perfectly natural branching off from the stem of his 
main interest. But it will be easier to make the 
events of the next period clear if he is seen as a sort 
of super-skater cutting on a mighty scale two loops 
which look separate at first but are finally seen to 
form a single expert figure eight. One loop was 
the New Politics and the other the New Protes- 
tantism. One was centred in the Fabian Society 
and the other in the Theatre. They spread out in 
ever-increasing sweeps, encircling the world from 
Moscow to Mexico, and New York to London. 
Each is interesting in itself, but puzzUng without 
the other. Points of inflexion don't interest whole- 
time socialists or playgoers, and to them he always 
appears to be going oflf at a tangent when he is 
really linking his double roles with the smoothest 
dexterity. 

The two roles must be examined separately and at 
some length and when this is done, as in the pages 

105 



SHAW 

which follow, it will be clear why the laughs some- 
times stop in the stalls and start in the gallery. 

Reading Capital was slow work. There was no 
English edition, and young Shaw had to plough 
through the French version, following that amazing 
argument as best he could. Even in English it is 
not easy to read Marx but there are compensations. 
His argument piles up layer on layer and the reader 
has at first the despairing sensation of being crushed 
under sheer weight of word-jugglery ; and then 
suddenly he is revived by a word-picture so crisp and 
vigorous that he feels the book would have been an 
even greater success as an anti-capitalistic tract if 
the attempts at logic had been left out. Marx is like 
A. A. Milne's cricketing postman who had two 
deliveries — one in the morning with correspondence, 
and the other in the afternoon with leg breaks. 
Take this, for instance : 

In order to discover how the elementary 
expression of the value of a commodity lies 
hidden in the value relation of two commodities, 
we must in the first place consider the latter 
entirely apart from its quantitative aspect. The 
usual mode of procedure is generally the reverse, 
and in the value relation nothing is seen but the 
proportion between definite quantities of two 
different sorts of commodities that are considered 
equal to one another. It is apt to be forgotten 
that the magnitudes of diflferent things can be 
compared quantitatively only when these magni- 

io6 



SHAW 

tudes are expressed in terms of the same unit. 
It is only as expressions of such a unit that they 
are of the same denomination and therefore 
commensurable. 

and compare it with : 

One fine morning in the year 1836, Nassau 
W. Senior, who may be called the bel esprit 
of English economists, well known alike for 
his economical " science " and his beautiful 
style, was summoned from Oxford to Man- 
chester to learn in the latter place the political 
economy that he taught in the former. The 
manufacturers elected him as their champion, 
not only against the newly passed Factory Act, 
but against the more menacing ten hours 
agitation. With their usual practical acuteness, 
they had found out that the learned Professor 
" wanted a good deal of finishing," and it was 
this discovery that caused them to write for 
him. 

or read this : 

The price form, however, is not only com- 
patible with the possibility of a quantitative 
incongruity between magnitude of value and 
price, i.e., between the former and its expression 
in money, but it may also conceal a qualitative 
inconsistency, so much so, that although money 
is nothing but the value form of commodities, 
price ceases altogether to express value. 

and then this : 

107 



SHAW 

The new machine-hands are exclusively 

girls and young women. With the help of 

mechanical force they destroy the monopoly 

which male labour had of the heavier work, 

and they drive off from the lighter work 

numbers of old women and very young children. 

The overpowering competition crushes the 

weakest of the manual labourers. The fearful 

increase in death from starvation during the 

last ten years in London runs parallel with the 

extension of machine sewing. 

and try to imagine what the first volume of Capital 

is like. Marx couldn't touch a general idea without 

doing five pages of German minuet about it, but 

when he got a fact, he was like a smith at an anvil. 

Shaw, as will be seen, was not impressed by the 

minuets, but he must have been delighted with 

Nassau W. Senior's trip to Manchester. Also he 

probably liked the scientific flavour of: 

the body as an organic whole is more easy of 

study than are the cells of that body. In the 

analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither 

microscope nor chemical reagents are of use. 

The force of abstraction must replace both. 

But in bourgeois society, the commodity form 

of the product of labour — or the value form of 

the commodity — is the economic cell form. 

Which brings Marx into line with Butler. But — and 

this is a most remarkable " but " — he didn't swallow 

the labour theory of value like Hyndman and the 

io8 



SHAW 

rest. Marx had managed to stamp it into them by 
arguments so abstruse and HegeHan that it seemed 
blasphemous to question them. He knew the value 
of slogans, and when, after two hundred repetitions 
of the words " surplus value," he said, " capital is 
congealed labour," they all repeated it reverently 
after him. 

Shaw never minded a little breezy blasphemy in 
a good cause, and in due time he said Marx was 
wrong. He presented his case against the labour 
theory of value jocularly at first in the hope of 
provoking a discussion which would clear the air. 
To his astonishment, he found that the English 
Socialist leaders could not refute his criticism, and 
worse, could not even see that their failure to do so 
would be fatal in the long run. Their eyes were 
fixed partly on particular abuses, partly on Marx, 
and partly on themselves. They had no time to 
waste on theories. He was different ; he hated 
being fooled as much as he hated fooling himself, 
and he set out single-handed to find a theory of 
value which would stand up to facts. 

He soon found himself in strange and difficult 
country, but nothing could stop him. He was 
heroic. Even when, on his search for new light on 
" value " he found Jevons reducing it to j = f{x) 
and y.dx = du, he was unstaggered. He bought 
a text-book and started a new study. He had 
never cared about algebra ; in his schooldays it 
had seemed to him a treacherous subject which 

109 



SHAW 



enticed the student away from the solid ground of 
concrete fact, from real numbers of miles and pints 
and shillings to a region of terrible uncertainty 
where a might be anything and x was unknown. 
He was all for clear-cut issues, numerical relation- 
ships and tangible classifications. When someone 
said ax^ -{- bx -\- c =^ o, he suspected trickery ; 
He couldn't stand the man who furtively slips 
V — I into an equation as a poacher slips a ferret 
into a rabbit hole. He was badly fitted to deal with 
problems involving functions and rates, but he went 
after them in that wholehearted magnificent way 
which was the glory of his youth. 

The diflferentials defeated him, but there was 
something attractive about the Jevons theory, and 
he struggled on till he had absorbed enough of it 
to satisfy him. The relative merits of different value 
theories do not matter here ; it is only his way with 
them that is to be noted — his realisation of the 
need for sound foundation, and his willingness to 
undertake any kind of gruelling work to try and 
find them. The people about him seemed to be 
content to have at their disposal two such lovely 
words for platform purposes as " bourgeoisie " and 
" proletariat," and did not understand his passion 
for getting down to the roots. Shaw saw from 
the beginning the need for going back to first 
principles, and his own difficulties with them taught 
him something of the complexity of economics. 
They also showed him what his role in the struggle 

no 



SHAW 

was to be. He saw on one side a mass of well- 
meaning ignorance, and, on the other, a mass of 
unconscious stupidity, and he decided that he must 
brush up both, and introduce them. He must be a 
teacher. He knew, as no other SociaHst did, how 
much there was to learn, and he was full of that 
restless energy which had driven him out of Dublin 
and through five unpublished novels. 

He knew that he must learn, and here again he 
showed that genius and common sense are insepar- 
able. For there are two ways of getting knowledge ; 
one is to dig it out with much toil, and the other is 
to find a friend who has done the digging. The 
friend in this case was Sidney Webb, whose fortune 
it was in those days to be in the very chart-room of 
state finance, and whose faculties were such that he 
could do all the digging needed without getting his 
hands blistered. In fact, he enjoyed it, and could 
cover as much ground in a week with pleasure as 
other men might slave over painfully and unpro- 
fitably for a year. He knew all about dividends, 
companies, costing, capital appreciation, unearned 
incomes, property valuation, and rent, in a way no 
ordinary member of the public understands ; he 
knew them as a washerwoman knows a shirt, he 
knew them inside out — he was in the Income Tax 
office. He was one of the brightest young men in 
the best civil service in the world ; he probably 
first got his eye on assessment returns in the mass 
about 1879, and by 1881, when he was transferred 

III 



S K A W 

to the Colonial Office, the most intimate and curious 
transactions of the property-owning and business 
world of London were an open book to him. 

Sidney Webb had scarcely begun hearing financial 
confessions when Shaw first saw him. It was at a 
small meeting of the sort attended by earnest young 
men in the eighties, and the proceedings must have 
been dull enough. The ordinary audience noticed 
that one of the speakers was more convincing than 
the others but Shaw noticed the same thing in his 
own special way. He noticed that Webb knew 
exactly what he was talking about, that he held in 
reserve a mighty mass of knowledge, that he picked 
out just what he required, packed it up in a neat 
sentence, and discharged it to produce exactly the 
effect he desired. He had no use for oratory, he 
simply stated his case in a neat, impersonal, efficient, 
unemotional way ; he was clear-headed, he was 
full of facts, he was sincere ; he was irresistible to 
the young Irishman who had been searching London 
for a sensible man for six years. Webb's way of 
approach to the problem of poverty had been via 
history— John Stuart Mill — and more history, parti- 
cularly the history of England. He knew it complete 
with footnotes. He could say offhand — " the Cor- 
poration of London actually carried on the business 
of fire insurance from 1681 to 1683 " — to the discom- 
fort of City men who tried to show that his ideas 
were new-fangled and impractical. His civil service 
work on top of his reading had made history alive 

112 



SHAW 

for him. He saw the events of the past in terms of 
social groupings, grab, political rivalry, and ignorant 
attempts at regulation. He saw in his experience 
from day to day the raw material for the history of 
the future, and he was searching for some way to 
make that history neater than the history of the past. 

Shaw knew from the first that Webb was his man. 
Whether Webb knew Shaw's value is doubtful. 
He had reached a dignified position in the Colonial 
Office by 1882, and he was really very English. 
It is most unlikely that he would have been attracted 
by a man with a brogue who was a walking indiscre- 
tion. Did Shaw put on a silk hat and an upper- 
class manner, and talk like a higher executive officer, 
or did he dance off like a will-o'-the-wisp spirit of 
democracy, drawing the other after him in sober 
steps with his uncanny, coaxing piping or what ? It 
is better that the truth should not be known — it's 
more fun to keep on guessing. Anyhow, the Fabian 
Society was the result. 

They entered as members, but in a few years the 
society belonged to them. Webb's knowledge and 
policy dominated it. He had made a synthesis of 
Mill, evolution and his reading of history. He saw 
England — the British Constitution — the British Isles 
— the British Empire — as a mighty growth within 
which was quickening with the centuries the great 
Spirit of Democracy. He saw the spirit emerging 
with time into definite forms, heedless of the interests 
of individual leaders and political parties. He felt 

113 ' 



SHAW 

that there was a Great Purpose to be served and 
that in the nineteenth century the rulers of the State 
should make themselves conscious of it, and act in 
accordance with " the great sweep of social tenden- 
cies," instead of struggling in petty rivalry and 
stupid ambition. He saw how states and cities had 
by degrees and almost unwittingly taken over 
one service and industry after another — the 
management of the Church, the details of public 
worship, the building of ships and houses, the 
provision of gasworks, and upkeep of roads and 
bridges. He saw how this communisation had 
spread to the colonies and how the central authorities 
there had built railways and theatres and become 
dealers in guano and quinine. He saw all these 
things, and a thousand others, with that vividness 
which comes from direct experience. He learnt 
from his books what had happened, and he knew 
from his daily work what was happening. He saw 
how the State gathered its income, and how, in 
recent years, it had been forced to dip deeper and 
deeper into the pockets of the rich to provide better 
facilities for the population as a whole. He saw, 
moreover, how interdependent were all public and 
private activities and tastes, and knew how the sheep- 
men of New Zealand swore as the ladies of London 
changed from flannel to crepe de chine. He saw that 
the British Empire had become by degrees a huge 
co-operative business without knowing it. He had 
a vision of underlying meanings and ultimate 

114 



SHAW 

purposes, and on one occasion he even said : *' the 
life of the community transcends that of its individual 
members," but generally he was patient and 
practical, and looked for ways and means rather 
than for beginnings and ends. The big Co-op. — 
the British Empire — seemed to him hopelessly 
disorganised, owing to the stupidity of the political 
leaders who were "so near to the individual events, 
that they were blind to the onward sweep of the 
column,'* and owing still more to the greed and 
laziness of the capitalists and landlords who lived 
by respectable forms of slavery and robbery. 

He wanted others to see the truth as he saw it, 
but he realised that it was only those of higher 
intellectual gifts that were capable of seeing the 
Social Organism as a whole, and devoting themselves 
to its service. The rest must be taught carefully 
and gradually, and the Fabians must learn in order 
to teach. There must be a science of society as 
there were sciences of stars, rocks, and plants, and 
man must set himself to make it, as those other 
sciences were made, by collecting, grouping, classi- 
fying and summarising social facts, till at last the 
laws which governed it would be as familiar as the 
laws of motion. This was the long view for those, 
who, like himself, had the faith and patience to 
undertake weary statistical work which might not 
bear full fruit for centuries. But there was also 
immediate work to be done and every statutory 
authority could do its share. Each council and 

115 



SHAW 

corporation had powers ready for use in the general 
social good, if only it could be persuaded to use 
them. If Socialists could be elected on these bodies 
and to Parliament, so much the better. But if not, 
then Conservatives, Liberals, and Independents were 
to be approached and persuaded to do something 
communistic. That word need not be used, but 
they could be urged to put up a pump, aboHsh a 
toll bridge, build a library, or, best of all, become 
landlords on a grand scale with huge housing 
schemes. Fabians must not be snobs ; it must not 
be beneath them to persuade a duke to attend the 
House of Lords to vote for a national drainage 
scheme, which would improve the value of his land. 
The duke would generally be bright enough to see 
that this was a Desirable Improvement, even if he 
could not foresee that his son might have to sell the 
improved land to the State for public parks, owing to 
heavy death duties and higher income tax which 
would be imposed to pay for the drainage. It took 
four or five years of discussion and experiment to 
work out this policy of steady pressure and penetra- 
tion, but eventually it became the basis of all Fabian 
activity. Slowly, gradually, inevitably, that was 
how the Life Force has created the world, and man 
must conform. He must take for his motto " the 
inevitability of gradualness," and learn to serve. 

In the Fabian Society Webb had the science, but 
it was Shaw that had the punch and his colleagues 
were quick to realise it. He must at first have 

ii6 



SHAW 

seemed a very odd person to William Clarke from 
Cambridge and Graham Wallas from Oxford. His 
tutors had been of a type scarcely known at either 
place, and his special branch of research had not been 
of late looked on kindly by those in charge of English 
Universities. But he was in congenial company 
and his charm was irresistible ; his power of incisive 
analysis of human conduct was a magnet to minds 
running in conventional English grooves. Webb 
could take a Department of State apart, as a watch- 
maker opens a watch ; and he could show how it was 
wound up every year by the Ministry of Finance, 
how some parts worked, and others were ornamental. 
But Shaw could take a man apart and show with 
vivid wit the curious underground passages linking 
his wishes, words and actions. He had developed 
his natural gift by years of meditation and novel 
writing, and after a short period of intimacy with 
Sidney Webb and the other economists, with whom 
his interests brought him in contact, he was ready 
for political action. 

He had the true missionary spirit, and he began 
by preaching. The reactions following that first 
revelation by Henry George never left him, and he 
was prepared to do anything to spread the light 
which burned so brightly within him. He under- 
stood better than any other Fabian how to spread 
it ; he knew the plain man, and knew that he 
could only appeal to hirn in the simplest terms with 
concrete instances and short, crisp sentences. His 

117 



SHAW 

own difficulties in mastering economic principles 
helped him here. To make things clear to himself, 
he thought in terms of real fields and real men. 
He didn't care about slippery thinking-counters 
like " commodities," he preferred to deal with 
cabbages, barley, furniture and fire-irons. So it was 
that when he could get even a dozen people gathered 
together in the street, all the farmers' sons, car- 
penters and blacksmiths understood exactly what he 
was saying ; he presented his case in a form which 
they could take home with them. He was a won- 
derful teacher. He was full of his subject and a 
master of language ; he had a voice like gold, and 
knew exactly how to use it. He had found out at last 
what to do with George Bernard Shaw, and he was 
doing it with his whole heart and his whole mind, and 
with all his faculties. His musical ear, his wit, his 
richly stored imagination, were all pressed into 
service in the most wonderful exhibition of public 
speaking ever staged as a free show in London. He 
was launched on his life's work at last after that long 
stretch of solitude and rejection ; how he must have 
enjoyed himself in the next twenty years as he spoke 
and wrote and raged to advance the cause of 
Socialism ! The precision, the gusto, the extra- 
vagance, the sheer whirlwind energy of those 
early onslaughts on the existing organisation of 
society saturate his first Fabian Essays, written in 
1888. They were published with others in 1889, 
with a warning preface that — " There are at present 

118 



SHAW 

no authoritative teachers of Socialism. The essayists 
make no claim to be more than communicative 
learners," but that must have been just Webb's fun. 
On September 7th, 1888, Shaw was telling the British 
Association members at Bath that " the militant 
organisation of the working classes and general 
insurrection — remains the only finally possible alter- 
native to the Social Democratic Programme which 
I have sketched to-day." 

But, sure as he was of himself and of the 
programme, there was one thing that bothered him. 
In those days a refined anarchism was fashionable. 
Prince Kropotkin had made it respectable in Europe 
and it flourished in cultured quarters in Boston, 
Mass. Anarchists were inclined to flutter jealously 
on the borders of socialistic organisations. They 
could not come in, because combination was against 
their principles, and they daren't stay out, because 
the Socialists claimed to be the leading champions 
of freedom and the modern champions of the rights 
of man. No self-respecting anarchist could tolerate 
such a claim from men who were sinking their 
individuality in a communistic pool, and oflTering 
themselves up trussed and gagged to a State idol 
called the Social Organism. Pure and high- 
spirited anarchists joined with the social democrats 
in calling down fire from heaven on slum landlords. 
Stock Exchange sharks, and all the sweaters and 
grinders of the poor, but when Webb and Go. tried 
to persuade them to get together and do something, 

119 



SHAW 

they rose up in all their outraged, individual divinity, 
and refused to submit to the discipline involved in 
any form of association whatever. It was a real 
difficulty. Webb wanted Justice, the others wanted 
Liberty, and the gods wouldn't kiss. The logicians 
said that there was nothing for it but to build two 
temples and put one god in each, but Shaw would 
have none of this. He understood both sides only 
too well, for George was all for Social Democracy, 
and Bernard knew that the anarchists were right. 
In fact, it was because he realised, better than anyone 
about him, the difficulties in which an honourable 
man lands himself when he makes private judgment 
the final court of appeal, that he became a special 
pleader against the ultra-individualists. He saw 
that this was no new dispute and that the rival 
high priests would multiply and destroy one another. 
He saw that socialistic solidarity must be preserved 
at all costs in face of the common enemy if any 
constructive work was to be done, and he spent much 
precious time in those early struggling years of the 
Fabian Society trying to keep the high-minded from 
being hasty. 

His lecture-essay on the " Impossibilities of 
Anarchism " is a masterpiece. He doesn't quite 
dodge the issue, but takes care not to face it long 
enough to start trouble. He gives a page or so to 
principles, and then in a masterly way brings the 
trouble-makers down to practical things — economic 
measures — ways and means — brass tacks. He per- 

120 



S H A \V 

suades them to come off their high horses and take 
a look at things like bread, farms, houses, and 
income tax ; in ten pages he has them spellbound 
with the simplicity and inevitability of Fabianism ; 
in twenty he has them agreeing that " there is no 
natural liberty but only natural law remorselessly 
enforced," and that the only hope of salvation from 
the eternal tyranny of Nature lies in the establish- 
ment of Social Democracy. And finally he manages 
to convey the impression that the most earnest 
anarchist in his audience is a lukewarm stick-in-the- 
mud, that Bakunin and the bomb-throwers are mere 
babes in thirst for destruction and hatred of the 
tyranny of authority, compared with G. B. Shaw. 
You can almost hear the splintering explosions and 
see the twisted bodies as he speaks of the policemen 
and the soldiers, the parsons and the plutocrats, of 
the existing system. Yet there is not a word of 
encouragement for Anarchism, nor a sentence of 
incitement, in that bloodthirsty peroration which 
sent the Kropotkin disciples home with an uneasy 
feeling that Fabianism was perhaps a very subtle 
and advanced form of anarchism. He was not, as 
will be seen, quite comfortable in his own mind 
about the problem raised, but he was so sweetly 
reasonable and generally outrageous that all budding 
anarchists danced to his piping, and followed him 
down the Fabian lane. 

He was from the beginning the practical clarifier 
and conciliator. Webb's idea of slow, resistless, 

121 



SHAW 

social action like the weathering of rocks or the 
growing of grass appealed to him immensely. It 
was in keeping with the ancient tradition of the 
landed Shaws of Kilkenny, and yet in touch with 
the latest scientific thought — or what was called 
the Modern Spirit. There was a wonderful sense 
of power in seeing the world making itself, in 
watching it grow, and knowing that one was called 
to lend a hand. He felt that few had such vision, 
as he saw men stumbling about confusedly, and 
using their vital forces in quarrelling instead of 
co-operating. It was his mission in the political 
field to be a mediator as well as a teacher, and to 
show the means by which all could work together 
to create a better world. Such uppish convictions 
would have ruined him had he taken them altogether 
seriously. He accepted them — but with considerable 
amusement. Beneath his absorption with socialism 
and his Fabian associations, he remained always the 
observer — the recorder — the artist-comedian. He 
was the most loyal of colleagues, but he couldn't 
help seeing that his fellow socialists were men and 
women before they were anything else ; they had 
many childish ways, and it was necessary to use a 
good deal of tact to get them to work together. In 
some ways during the twenty years from 1 884-1 904 
he was like a very capable mother of a large and 
troublesome family, chaflfing and coaxing to get the 
day's work done, and not afraid to do some spanking 
when necessary. 

122 



SHAW 

He was a grand worker and he finished up that 
score of breathless years as Vestryman and Borough 
Councillor for St. Pancras for the term 1 897-1 903. 
He took his share of the load wherever he found it, 
and he practised his preaching in the council 
chamber and committee room for a full term. It 
seems an anti-climax for the boy novelist and the 
flaming orator to settle down to that dreary grind 
of public business with minutes, resolutions and 
manoeuvres about officials' salaries taking up so 
much valuable time, but he went through it like an 
apprentice learning a useful trade, and his later 
writings are full of the ballast of the knowledge of 
local government and the machinery of adminis- 
tration gained in those six municipal years. 

He was wildly busy in other fields all this time. 
He was writing startling plays at a furious rate with 
one hand, and superlative dramatic criticism for 
the Saturday Review with the other ; he was having 
the plays published, rehearsed and produced ; he 
was getting married ; he was furiously engaged in 
every form of socialistic activity that a super-charged 
ingenuity could devise ; and in his spare time he was 
learning to ride the bicycle. 

There had been bicycles before, but this was the 
" safety," and it was making a stir that no one born 
after 1 890 can understand. How can it be described 
to a generation that tries a motor cycle, a speedboat, 
a sports car and a monoplane before it is twenty, 
and then looks round wearily for something newer 

123 



SHAW 

and faster. They didn't get bored so quickly in the 
'nineties. Magazines were full of stories of the new 
swift method of travel. H. G. Wells made a 
romance about a cycling clerk. Any young woman 
could get a name for being an advanced thinker or 
a shameless hussy by riding a bicycle in public ; 
correct young men averted their eyes as she passed. 
Sunday cycling was a sin. Tempers were lost 
and families disrupted about " bloomers " — called 
" rational costume " in honour of Herbert Spencer. 
It is hard to believe that there are still millions of 
men and women in England who lived through all 
this and whose hearts thrill to the tune of Daisy 
Bell ; and harder still to believe that Shaw at forty 
was only just getting expert at ripping downhill on 
his first bike, with his feet stuck on the fork rests 
and the pedals whirling madly beneath him. 

He was able to buy his own bicycles by 1896. 
He began, as a journalist, to help his mother and 
sister to keep a roof over their heads, about 1885. 
He never seems to have realised his possibilities in 
this field till friends like William Archer and Annie 
Besant, not deceived by his air of being a young man 
of independent means, who wore frayed cuffs as a 
fad, inveigled him into it. Once launched on the 
staff of the World in 1886 he knew that journalistic 
criticism of art and artists was his natural trade. 
From 1886 to 1898 he was reviewer and art critic 
to the Pall Mall Gazette, World, Star and Saturday 
Review in succession ; that is, he was supposed to 

124 



SHAW 

write from week to week something about a book, 
picture, exhibition, concert or play of public 
interest at the moment. That was how critics 
earned their living ; they wrote carefully arranged 
bits of praise and depreciation of certain features 
of the work presented to them, and let it go at 
that. Above all things they avoided personal 
feeling, or any suggestion that the writer, painter, 
singer or actor was a human being. Artists were 
supposed to turn out their work as a lathe turns 
out a bolt, and certain approved standards were 
applied like calipers to determine its quality. 
Ruskin, for instance, had decided the features which 
a painting must have to make it a good picture, 
and all that the art critic had to do was to learn 
the rules and go ahead with his column week by 
week. 

Shaw changed all that — almost single-handed. 
He knew music, pictures, books, as a good groom 
knows horses. He didn't have to poke about for 
rules. His knowledge was sure, intimate, part of 
himself He poured out criticism as a practised 
hostess pours out tea. He had grown up with those 
things, loved them, studied them, and he didn't 
have to speak about art, work, and workers, in a 
hushed voice with strange, stiff words. Even the 
newest work — if it had any good in it — was familiar 
in hundreds of old, everyday, interesting ways. 
He had only to read books or look at pictures, or 
listen to music, and then say what he thought about 

125 



SHAW 

them as plainly, as clearly as he could. It was very 
readable, fresh, chatty, easy-going criticism, but it 
was most irregular. There was no special vocabu- 
lary used, no prescribed rules, and an awful tendency 
to drag the artist into the open and take off some of 
his fashionable well-creased clothes. Shaw seemed 
to want to get away from mannerisms, materials, and 
the particular work in hand, and down to the man, 
and what he thought, felt, had to say for himself. 
When he found an artist copying or turning out 
stuff mechanically, or putting himself in front of the 
music, he put down his pen and took up a tomahawk. 
It was great fun, and it looked so easy that imitators 
came into the field at once, with disastrous results. 
Readers thought it was a great joke : " That fellow 
Shaw — the Socialist, you know — is writing about 
music. He doesn't know a thing about it, but he's 
fearfully funny. Last week he actually criticised 
Paderewski — said his playing was hard on the 
audience, but harder on Schumann — Imagine ! " 

There was not at first much evidence of any 
particular theory about art. He had served the 
proper apprenticeship for his position, and, like a 
good plumber or cook or accountant, he was able 
to take the normal features in his stride and concen- 
trate on the unusual. It is just this economy of 
effort, this sense of penetrating and exact observation 
carried out with the greatest ease, which gives those 
early criticisms their wonderful quality. You feel 
that he is prepared even to this day to stand over 

126 



SHAW 

every word he said. He did not make up a criticism, 
but rather set free a flood of expression, which still 
tingles with his delight in writing it, and his convic- 
tion that what he had to say was worth saying. It 
was his mission in the artistic field to attack bad 
work, to help the artist, to teach the public what to 
look for, to make them thoroughly ashamed of 
themselves where necessary, and to give praise 
where it was due. He managed to do all this with- 
out being an insufferable prig, by some magic of his 
own, and a mock comedy treatment which it is 
quite impossible to describe : 

As to the singing, there was a tenor who 
was compendiously announced as " Signor 
Rawner, who has created so great a sensation 
in Italy," and who is undoubtedly capable of 
making an indelible mark anywhere. I listened 
expectantly for Deserto sulla terra, knowing that 
if the sensationist were a fine artist, his inter- 
pretation of its musical character would surround 
it with illusion, making it come from among the 
trees in the moonlight, soft, distant, melancholy, 
haunting ; whereas, if he were the common or 
Saflfron Hill Manrico, he would at once display 
his quality by a stentorian performance in the 
wing, putting all his muscle and wind into a 
final B flat (substituted for G), and storming 
London with that one wrong note alone. My 
suspense was short. Signor Rawner, knowing 
nothing about the musical character of the 

127 



SHAW 



serenade, but feeling quite sure about the B fiat, 

staked his all on it ; and a stupendous yell it 

was. It is said that he can sing D ; and though 

he mercifully refrained from actually doing so, 

I have not myself the smallest doubt that he 

could sing high F in the same fashion if he only 

tried hard enough {Music in London, Vol. I, 

p. 8). 

He was always like that when artists threw the 

piece out of focus, to show off a speciality, and the 

more famous the artist the harder he hit. Listen to 

this about Bernhardt : 

Take, for example, the end of the third act 
of this Princesse Lointaine which she selects as her 
opportunity for one of those displays of vehe- 
mence which are expected from her as part of 
the conventional Bernhardt exhibition. It is 
pure rant and nothing else. When once she 
begins to tear through her lines at the utmost 
pitch of her voice, she shows no further sense of 
what she is saying, and is unable to recover 
herself when in the final speech the feeling 
changes. As her physical endurance threatens 
to fail, she tears along the faster, and finally 
rushes off the stage in a forced frenzy. I do not 
deny that there is something very exciting in a 
blind whirlwind of roaring energy. I have seen 
working-class audiences spring to their feet and 
cheer madly for three minutes at it. But then 
the artist was Mr. John Burns who can give 
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SHAW 

Madame Bernhardt a start of several miles at 
that particular sort of effect, and beat her easily. 
And I am bound to say, injustice to Mr. Burns, 
that I have never seen him bring down the 
curtain in this fashion until the play was really 
over, or substitute the peroration for the 
business part of the speech, whereas Madame 
Bernhardt does deliberately substitute rant for 
the business of the play. {Our Theatre in the 
'Nineties, Vol. I, p. i68.) 
There is more in this than meets the eye. He was 
standing up for the rights of the dramatist and for 
intelligent acting, but that was not all. He was not 
satisfied with his special mission as art critic, and 
long before 1895, when that passage was written, he 
had laid out his plan of campaign for bringing the 
theatre into line with the evolutionary thought of the 
day and making the stage a pulpit for modern 
prophets. He had published The Quintessence of 
Ibsenism in 1890 ; his first play. Widowers' Houses, 
was performed in 1892 ; and he was on his way to 
public favour with the production of Arms and the 
Man in 1894. Everything was working out accord- 
ing to plan, and he was using his position as a critic 
to obtain a hearing for true artists who grew plays 
instead of constructing them. It was all fair and 
square, as open and above board as that criticism 
of Bernhardt. He wanted actors to do something 
more than give a perform-ance and he spurred them 
on, in a way all his own, to make the very best of 
s. J 29 K 



SHAW 

their powers. But over and above that, he wanted 
them to fit and dovetail into a poHcy which had 
the same relation to the Great Purpose on the 
dramatic front as Fabianism in the political front. 
He wanted more of Ibsen's plays in London. The 
Social Organism was struggling on many fronts, 
using all kinds of men as weapons for its Purpose. 
Some knew what was afoot and were willing to 
serve, and in the front rank of these was Ibsen. 
He was a wholehearted believer in the poet as 
creator, not in any dependent or subordinate creat- 
ing capacity, but as the very fount and origin of the 
beauty he brought into existence. It was life, of 
course, which worked within him, but life was 
something incapable of any rational explanation 
whatever. To Ibsen and Shaw it was a blind force 
dependent upon artists of honour for intelligible 
outlet and advance. A poet lent himself to life, 
and life did the rest. Ibsen used to be able to feel 
a play growing inside him like an embryo till in the 
end it quickened, kicked and burst out. He had one 
about every two years. 

The first of them to come to London was A DolVs 
House. It was presented in 1889, and then came 
the Ibsen-row. There had just been a Wagner-row, 
but that had been a very select affair for musical 
critics. This new one was anybody's fight. The 
man in the street doesn't easily get worked up about 
music, but he gets wildly excited over discussions 
about the domestic affairs which Ibsen was using 

130 



SHAW 

as material for his plays. He dramatised everyday 
situations with wonderful skill and insight, and yet 
allowed his characters to behave shockingly with a 
word of reproof. Women were unwomanly, and 
got away with it, and men were heroic and did not 
get away with it. There was the dickens of a row 
with people taking sides, writing letters, and calling 
names all over the place. There were disputes 
about stagecraft, children, religion, duty — about 
anything rather than the philosophy behind the 
plays. That, however, was what took Shaw's fancy 
from the beginning, and his Quintessence of Ibsenism 
was the result. Wagner had broken new ground, 
and conquered in music, and now Ibsen was coming 
with a new and wonderful message in drama. The 
world was changing, man was becoming conscious 
of his destiny, old institutions were crumbling, the 
dawn of the twentieth century was at hand, outworn 
moralities and cramping creeds must go, and all the 
rest of it. Shaw didn't lose his head about progress 
so badly as some of the others who wrote like this, 
but he believed in the message. He saw the theatre 
as the church of the new century and threw himself 
into the campaign for the New Drama and the New 
Morality with the same terrific energy and concen- 
tration that he had already shown in the cause of 
Socialism. 

The Quintessence of Ibsenism is the keel of his 
dramatic career. In it he laid down the thesis and 
argument for all that followed, as firmly and definitely 

131 



SHAW 

as he knew how. The argument was developed as a 
side issue in A Perfect Wagnerite (1898), thrown into 
dramatic form in Man and Superman (1902) and 
followed up with i's dotted and t's crossed in Back 
to Methuselah (192 1). Whatever Shaw is, he is not 
erratic. He is the most carefully conscientious and 
consistent artist that ever lived. He may contradict 
himself, but he never wavers. In fact, from 1890, 
his philosophic career is dreadfully dull, so finally 
did he settle everything then and so exactly did he 
follow the regulations he prescribed. It is true that 
these are mighty queer and that his opinions and 
actions will look in turn blatant, nonsensical, 
extravagant, blasphemous, quixotic, and every other 
adjective of the kind, to anyone who tries to measure 
him by normally accepted standards — either those 
of the Christian or those of the commercial world. 
He lives in a world of his own, and his behaviour in 
it is correct to a degree which may well send cold 
shivers down the back of any happy-go-lucky 
sinner who dares turn a purely intellectual search- 
light on his own daily conduct. 

The Ibsen ruction. Creative Evolution, the New 
Protestantism and the uprise of the artist prophets, 
all began with a fresh attempt to get a good answer 
to the question " What's a baby ? " The Middle 
Ages had it that he was something wonderful. Then 
came the Reformers, saying that Natural Instincts 
were Filthy and Babies a Bad Lot. This was too 
horrible for the average man, and the religious 

132 



SHAW 

history of Europe for the next four centuries is the 
story of the ways in which he tried to solve the 
question without going back to 1274. It did not 
bother him so much while he was poor, but when the 
Industrial Revolution made him rich and respectable 
and he had more scope for sinfulness, his private 
life became full of problems about women and 
children. Ibsen took some of the strange situations 
which he saw about him and touched them up with 
a poetic hand into problem plays. Situations, real 
and terrible enough in life, were turned into cases, 
the new dramatic and literary art was launched, and 
a new answer given to the question about the baby. 
The poets were out to rescue him from the 
agnostics and the super-Darwinists. The former 
were getting a reputation for wisdom by saying that 
they knew nothing, and that a baby was an 
Unfathomable Mystery ; the others said that a baby 
was built like a machine and that, given a free hand 
with lancets and chloroform in an orphanage, they 
could find out what made it tick. However crazy 
the Creative Evolutionists look to-day, it must 
always be remembered that they were at first a 
rescue party out to save the children from the 
ultra-rationaHsts. They had learnt — God knows 
how — that a baby was something fresh and delightful, 
and they wanted to protect him and give him a 
chance to reahse himself They rehed upon Evolu- 
tion and they thought that any new child might be 
the bearer of a message which would carry man a 

133 



SHAW 

further stage upward towards the Ultimate Purpose. 
His impulses must not be cramped by the credulities 
and customs of a bygone age — particularly of the 
age of reason. Old habits and old institutions were 
useful for children who had not the vitaHty to make 
their instincts imperious, but the exceptional infant 
must not be shackled by them. His impulses — his 
will to live — were all-important, and his impulse 
toward greater freedom was sufficient ground for 
the repudiation of any duty however sacred which 
conflicted with it. This was the New Protestantism 
in a nutshell. 

Men like Ibsen and Shaw did not find the new 
religion as simple and delightful as it looked to 
their youthful disciples. For the child as he grew 
up had not only an impulse to realise himself, but 
another impulse to make the reahsation reasonable. 
The exposure of ways in which he fooled himself 
in efforts to reconcile the tv/o forces with one 
another and with existing conventions was the main- 
spring of the new drama. Some men were terribly 
reasonable and produced rigid irrevocable plays, 
others were full of imagination and wilfulness and 
produced irresponsible, wandering plays. In Brand 
and Peer Gynt the men were on a grand scale ; they 
were heroes all-of-a-piece, who clung to their ideals 
to the end. Later, Ibsen made plays with small- 
scale people fooHng themselves in conventional ways, 
and arranged his action to show the gradual breaking 
down of the ideals which had upheld them. The 

134 



SHAW 

discovery that plays could be made by this unmask- 
ing process had an effect on Shaw similar to his 
earlier discovery that fortunes could be made by rent 
collection. Henry George taught him that he had 
been a communist all along, and now Ibsen showed 
him that he had been a modern dramatist from the 
day of his letter to Public Opinion. Immaturity, The 
Irrational Knot, and the rest, were really plays which 
had taken the wrong turning. Their author was, in 
fact, the world's champion unmasker, but it had 
never occurred to him to make dramatic capital out 
of his talent. 

He had made an attempt to collaborate with 
William Archer in writing a play in 1885 j Archer 
was to supply the plot and Shaw the dialogue, but 
the Shaw dialogue ate up all the Archer plot in the 
first act, and the partnership was dissolved. Seven 
years later, stimulated by Ibsen, he completed 
Widowers' Houses, which, like an ugly duckUng, 
pushed itself in amongst The Private Secretary, Haddon 
Hall, The Guardsman, The Silent Battle, Dorothy ^ 
and the rest af the legitimate brood on December gth, 
1892. 



135 



CHAPTER VI 

In a fairy-tale world the ugly duckling gets a bad 
time because it is different. In the newspaper 
world conditions are reversed, and the thing that's 
different gets the magazine page. A motor-car 
manufacturer doesn't mind the public telHng funny 
stories about his product if he knows the car will go. 
In fact, the wilder the stories are the better he likes 
them — publicity value being directly proportional 
to wildness. Shaw knew, as he watched that first 
performance of Widowers' Houses in December, 1892, 
that he could make plays that would go. The 
critics didn't think he could, nor did the public, 
and they continued to say so violently for days, to 
his great delight. It didn't cost him a penny, and 
everyone was being taught to say Shaw's a Socialist 
and Shaw's a Showman, and to look forward 
pleasantly to some sort of fireworks every time the 
name was mentioned. 

Widowers' Houses irritated the public thoroughly. 
It pretended to be a play when it was really a dose of 
medicine. It contrasted violently with the standard 
play devised to amuse the audience, massage their 
emotions slightly, and send them home sleepy and 
comforted. The popular play of 1890 was, in fact, 

136 



SHAW 

very much like the popular film of to-day ; it was con- 
structed so that it could be understood without any 
mental exertion. The theatre was a place where 
people were entertained by being soothed. Shaw 
proposed to entertain them by making them think. 
He had been doing a lot of thinking since 1866 and 
he wanted to give everyone the benefit of it. Since 
1882 the thinking had been running in a deep 
economic groove, and when he tried to materialise 
it dramatically, the effects were shocking. The 
audience came to see a play and got the gist of the 
Fabian Essay on Rent, wrapped up in the chatter 
of nice people staying at the best hotels. There was 
nothing gloomy about the scenes : all had their 
share of bright lights, luxury and pretty dresses, and 
there was nothing false about the story : blue books 
were brought on the stage to certify the facts — but 
the play was horribly unsettling. Many a decent 
man with a few snug investments went to it, and was 
bothered for days afterwards trying to find out where 
Shaw was wrong. It was not so easy. 

It took him a few years to find out that play- 
writing of that sort was useless if he wanted to be 
an artist with a public. And he wanted that just 
as much as he wanted to set the world right. In 
fact, the two wants are from the Creative Evolution 
point of view indistinguishable, being in essence 
nothing but the result of a sudden effort of the Life 
Force at Synge Street, Dublin, in 1856. But this 
merging and new mysticism is confusing to non- 
137 



SHAW 

initiates, and for the moment it is better to consider 
him as a very keen young man anxious to have his 
plays produced, and showing great practical intelli- 
gence in the way he went about it. He had always 
liked the theatre, and when he found that he could 
write plays that were playable, he began to study it 
with the greatest care from the playwright's point 
of view. After The Philanderer and Mrs. Warren's 
Profession, he knew that he could not get far by 
holding the microscope up to Nature, making 
people uncomfortable, and giving actors and 
actresses more than they could do. There were 
only a certain number of actors in London and a 
certain number of ways in which each of them could 
act. If Shaw wanted them to dance to his piping, 
he must make music to which they could dance. 
The plays of the 1894- 1900 period are the result. 

His adaptability was amazing. He wrote plays 
to suit a public, to suit a theatre, to suit one actor, 
to suit a pair of actors, but above all, to suit himself. 
From the very beginning he knew what he was 
after, and it did not turn him from his purposes in 
the least to have to turn out gay nonsense like 
Tou Never Can Tell, or sob-stuff like Candida. Beneath 
these cloaks George Shaw moved steadily and 
patiently about his business. He was a Fabian and 
knew that gradual action could be as effective in 
the theatre as in the committee-room — remember 
that he was busy with Casar and Cleopatra as he went 
to and fro, attending to the parochial affairs of St. 

138 



SHAW 

Pancras in 1898. He couldn't spring his ideas too 
suddenly on the pubhc. He set them out boldly 
for the elect in his prefaces, but it was necessary to 
wean the people slowly and patiently. Infiltration 
was the best poHcy, and in Candida (1894), The 
DeviVs Disciple (1897) and Man and Superman (1903) — 
or for that matter in any succession of his plays 
during the pre-war period — it can be seen at work. 
It can be seen even more clearly in his Dramatic 
Criticism in the Saturday Review from 1895 to 1898 
when he worked week by week trying to get the 
public to bring their minds to the theatre with 
them, the actors to take some interest in the parts 
they were playing and people generally to see life as 
he saw it. In 1892 a dignified imperialistic news- 
paper tried to squash him with : " Mr. Shaw wishes 
to utter a tirade against certain abuses ; he thinks 
the theatre is a suitable pulpit for his utterances." 
That was exactly what he did wish and think, and 
he didn't mind who knew it. As he said himself a 
few years later : 

I am not an ordinary playwright. I am a 
specialist in immoral and heretical plays. My 
reputation has been gained by my persistent 
struggle to force the public to reconsider its 
morals. In particular, I regard much current 
morality as to economic and sexual relations 
as disastrously wrong ; and I regard certain 
doctrines of the Christian religion as under- 
stood in England to-day with abhorrence. I 

139 



SHAW 

write plays with the dehberate object of convert- 
ing the nation to my opinion on these matters. 
I have no other effectual incentive to write 
plays, as I am not dependent on the theatre for 
my livelihood. If I were prevented from 
producing immoral and heretical plays I should 
cease to write for the theatre, and propagate 
my views from the platform and through books. 
{Prefaces, p. 408.) 
In the 'nineties he was dividing his time equally 
between the political and dramatic roles, and his 
purpose had not quite crystallised out in this clear- 
cut, implacable form. He expressed it from time 
to time in various ways, but his statements were 
received with nods and becks and wreathed smiles 
by a delighted public, who insisted on believing that 
this living lump of dynamite was a droll fellow, who 
was cashing in on his quality as a jester in a normal 
business-like way. Many a prophet would have 
despaired at such a slight. Instead, Shaw turned it 
into an asset ; he took the popular belief that he was 
a clown, as a magic cloak, under which he had a 
special licence to go anywhere and say anything. 
Any intelligent government would have had him 
and his like locked up ; but it was the day of art for 
art's sake, and Cabinet Ministers would have laughed 
at the suggestion that plays had anything to do with 
social upheavals. 

He was wonderful. However disreputable his 
doctrine, it is impossible to watch his work in these 

140 



SHAW 

years without wanting to get up and cheer — or is it 
only the untutored Irishman who wants to shout 
" Up, Man, though you burst the British Empire," 
at the sight of him backing his conscience against 
the world of rent and big business ? 

He was far too wise to go out trying to start an 
open conspiracy. He was a soloist and he knew it ; 
and he was also a good deal of a child full of his 
own importance, going about — like Stevenson's 
boy with the dark lantern under his coat — full of 
tremors and anticipations. If you don't see him 
and love him like this you will never know him or 
understand his plays. It seems fantastic to say that 
an intensely serious social worker and a child playing 
at nursery tricks was one man, but he himself— or 
any reputable scientist — will tell you that the closer 
you get to facts the more fantastic they appear. 
Take these extracts from his letter to Ellen Terry 
(January 27th, 1897) : 

In this world, you must know all points of 
view, and take one and stick to it. In taking 
your side, don't trouble about its being the right 
side — north is no righter or wronger than south 
— but be sure that it is really yours, and then 
back it for all you are worth. And never 
stagnate. Life is a constant becoming, all 
stages leading to the beginning of others. . . . 
The theatre is my battering ram as much as the 
platform or the press . . . my capers are part 
of a bigger design than you think. Shakespeare 

141 



SHAW 

is to me, one of the towers of the Bastille and 

down he must come. . . . Never mind your 

young families ; omelettes were not made 

without breaking eggs, and I hate families. 

. . . What I say to-day everybody will say 

to-morrow. 

There is the boy with his finger on his lips, his 

cloak and his conspiratorial air, full of cryptic 

sayings and dark hints of inside knowledge, playing 

at revolution and conquest with the most deadly 

earnestness. 

There is no real right side. That is the essence 
of his faith and his preaching. In the Life Force 
there is no stable truth. To man in his little day 
there seems a passing permanence, a transient 
stability, a flattening out, on which Life seems to 
pause in its course, and which he calls truth. To 
linger on one of these facets, to cling to it, is to 
become imbedded in the past and to petrify. Life 
moves ever onward, and to move with it is to live 
. . . " kindness and truth and justice are not duties 
founded on abstract principles external to man, but 
human passions which have in their time conflicted 
with higher passions as well as with lower ones." 
..." Try how wicked you can be ; it is precisely 
the same experiment as trying how good you can 
be." ..." There is no law so independent of 
circumstances that the time never comes for breaking 
it." So in The Sanity of Art (republished in book 
form ten years later), he continues to oflfer unweary- 

142 



SHAW 

ing witness to the intuitions which well up within 
him. 

Here is the New Protestantism at greater length : 
The Life Force is blind. It shoots out in all 
directions, but has a preference for none. It forms 
instruments but has no plan for them. Man is 
aware of its surging energy through his instincts, 
and through the most powerful of them is made to 
maintain the chain of vital energy with an annual 
quota of young life. Each of these little ones comes 
bearing with him millions of memories and messages 
from the past, but also some potentiality of his own, 
which is a special and sacred gift from the Life 
Force. He feels this gift as his very self. It is his 
inner citadel. He will stake everything to preserve 
it. Beside it, even his own life is nothing. He will 
not hand it over to any mortal man or to any earthly 
power. 

The Protestant enshrines the gift in a private 
tabernacle ; he abhors Rome and the confessional, 
because of his conviction that they threaten it. But 
Shaw could see that an organised Protestant religion 
was a contradiction in terms — an inconsequent copy 
of the Catholic Church — and he concluded that the 
religion of the twentieth century — the religion of the 
Modern Spirit — must rest on some less institutional 
recognition of that tabernacle. The New Protes- 
tantism must be founded on inward adoration of 
one's own private judgment and outward toleration 

143 



SHAW 

of all men. Thus would the Life Force be given 
full scope ; thus would the artist be stimulated to 
his highest pitch of activity and at the same time 
freed from external restraints to self-expression. 
But there was one danger, there was one deadly 
enemy of the Life Force ; there was one intolerable 
person — the man who said that there were laws 
prescribed for men. The man who said that 
there were in the world rules valid at all times 
and in all places, must be eliminated ; he was the 
enemy of evolutionary advancement, and the 
institutions which he created on the basis of these 
rules were prisons for the children of the future. 

An institution may be good for a time, for one 
year or a thousand years, but life moves on, and 
sooner or later some child is born with a potentiality 
which conflicts with the rules. The Life Force has 
no design, but is always trying, and each child is 
an experiment. He (or she, for the Life Force has 
no sex partiaHties) arrives ready stamped by some 
instantaneous impulse of the Time Spirit. The 
child who is to carry the torch of life onward and 
upward arrives earmarked for some special activity. 
He is predestinate. He must conform. To fulfil 
his destiny to perfection he must " find the point 
of view which is really his, and then back it for all 
he is worth." He seems to himself to have freedom, 
but this is an illusion ; he is not really free till he is 
doing the work for which he has been stamped out. 
He must stick to his cell. He cannot find his 

144 



SHAW 

point of view by any rule or law outside of his 
own nature or by any established convention or 
by any imitation of others. There is no help to 
be had from outside. He can only find it by 
trial and error. His inmost wish is his guide, and 
that course of action which he can follow without 
qualms or doubts, and above all without shame or 
excuses, is for him the true way. It may be what 
others call murder, or cruelty, or adultery, or theft, 
or blasphemy, but these names must not deter if the 
sacred mentor within tells him to march fearlessly 
ahead. If the Life Force has not modelled him for 
a thief, then he will be downhearted in his thieving. 
If he is not meant to be a Don Juan, he will be uneasy 
in the love-nest. The experiment of being as wicked 
as he can must be abandoned, if it is not honestly 
successful. And it is just the same with experiments 
in being good. The boy who sets out to be a model 
to the community, and finds his pious practices a 
sham, and his week-day work a slavery, is being 
warned by the Life Force that he is in the wrong 
shop. The man who goes regularly to the Rotary 
Club, notwithstanding the spiritual nausea which 
rises up within him at the luncheon table, is ignoring 
sacred promptings. The wild impulse that comes 
over him at times to roar " To hell with Service," 
may be an inspiration direct from the Life Force. 
He cannot tell till he responds to it, till he tries. 
The trial may ruin him socially and financially, 
but if it brings him a sense of release — of refreshment 

145 



SHAW 

— of new life — then he knows that, come weal, come 
woe, he has committed a noble blasphemy. 

Thus the Life Force taps out potentiality inspira- 
tion and at random . . . tinker — tailor — soldier 
— sailor — rich man — poor man — beggarman — thief 
... it pays no attention to parents or environment. 
The " rich man " urge may tap an attic in the 
slums, and the " poor man " urge a palace nursery. 
Then, if the urges are strong, that is, if the 
children " have the vitality to make their instincts 
imperious,*" the slum child rises to the palace and 
the other shakes the gold dust from his feet and goes 
out into the wilderness alone. It is the same with 
the soldier and the thief. A boy is born in Corsica 
with a love for power, and forty years later Napoleon 
is dominating Europe. Another boy is born in 
New York keen on easy money, and forty years later 
there is a rumpus on Wall Street and a new pleasure 
yacht sailing down the Hudson. These are the boys 
that matter. The rest, the weakhngs, with their 
half-hearted wishes and feeble struggling activities, 
are Life Force failures, so much waste product, so 
much material for the master minds to turn into 
factory workers, clerks, journalists, economic experts, 
political props or anything else that may be required 
for the purpose in hand. They are, above all, 
copyists and imitators, and they love to be led. 

This great group live on the rules laid down 
in the past, and on the standard conventions of 
the day. From them they make up the mental 

146 



SHAW 

pictures which they call their worlds. When 
circumstances collect a large number of them with 
similar pictures into one place, it is called a suburb 
or perhaps a very exclusive club. But these waste 
products — these slaves — are not all alike. The first 
and commonest type is the hard-headed Philistine 
who gets through life pleasantly enough, because his 
nature and experience so closely match the picture 
he has selected, that he is barely conscious of his 
own existence. The second is the one hundred per 
cent idealist, who skips lightly over awkward facts, 
or, without qualms, twists them to fit his picture ; he 
has just as good a time as the first, in fact better, 
because his struggle with the facts make him 
proudly conscious of his picture and his relation to 
it ; he is righteous and he knows it. The third is 
the unfortunate who is partly conscious that his 
picture does not match reality, and his life is misery, 
or rather, he goes up and down in a sea of uncertainty, 
hysterically glad when facts fit, and distraught when 
they don't. Sometimes one of these unhappy ones 
sees, in a flash of inspiration, that part of his picture 
is wrong and that it is better to alter it than to fiddle 
with the facts ; sometimes even, the flash is so 
brilliant that it shows up the entire picture, releases 
him from the slave group and sets him free to move 
among the gods. 

The gods are of two kinds. The first — the Class I 
god — is he who delivers the vital message unsullied, 
i.e.y untouched by the intellect. He is not troubled 

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SHAW 

about rational behaviour, but works from day to day 
in perfect intimacy with the Life Force, relying on 
instinct and intuition. He is always ready with 
reasons if questioned, but makes them up to suit the 
occasion, and the querist. He goes after what he 
wants with absolute conviction and decides after- 
wards, if at all, why he wanted it. The Class II god 
is he who looks the facts of life fixedly in the face and 
sees that they sort out into a process of Creative 
Evolution. He is an ultra-rationalist, but his picture 
has none of the rigid fixity of the slave pictures. He 
knows that the reason for everything is that there is 
no reason for anything. His picture of reality is a 
moving picture to match the ever-changing world. 
It has neither form nor design — the deadly dogmatic 
prisons of the past — but shows in dim shimmering 
tones the Life Force striving to become conscious of 
itself. This is its great purpose — the purpose which 
holds together all pre-history, outline history and 
actual history. It is manifest through all human 
activity in man's pursuit of knowledge, particularly 
in those quests in which intuition outdistanced 
reason and gave birth to some great synthesis or 
enduring work of art. 

Class II god is almost a new species. For him 
the difficulties of the past are wiped out. There are 
no problems of evil and pain, for it is clear that the 
Life Force working at random to fulfil its purpose 
must make mistakes, and that many things must go 
wrong before all comes right. There need be no 

148 



SHAW 

anxiety about death and judgment, for there is but 
one world which is creating itself. Death, in fact, 
is only a rather interesting dodge by which the Life 
Force frees men from their self-importance when 
they have served its purpose. If they have served 
it well the manifold results of their good actions will 
be carried forward through the ages into everlasting 
communes. This is the meaning of life everlasting, 
this is the new revelation, so potent that since the 
beginning of the century new converts to Creative 
Evolution have been eagerly tearing away masks 
and showing their glowing, shimmering picture to 
all those fit to receive the message. 

There were few fit for it in the 'nineties. In 1898 
Shaw wrote in The Perfect Wagnerite : 

The majority of men at present in Europe 
have no business to be alive, and no serious 
progress will be made until we address our- 
selves earnestly and scientifically to the task of 
producing trustworthy human material for 
society. In short, it is necessary to breed a 
race of men in whom the life-giving impulses 
predominate before the New Protestantism 
becomes politically practicable. 
That was the serious side of the business. But there 
was another side which must be viewed and considered 
although it is indescribable and presents an insoluble 
problem. Shaw's teaching and his plan of campaign 
are plain as a pikestaff, but there is an element 

149 



SHAW 

running through it all which is a perpetual mystery. 
When he had laid down his creed and drawn the 
obvious conclusions from it in the most dogmatic and 
final fashion, the whole thing sometimes seemed to 
strike him as a tremendous joke. This was a point 
of view which his disciples were never able to under- 
stand. It annoyed them. Earnest Creative Evolu- 
tionists following him reverently and earnestly were 
suddenly brought up with a jolt against a peculiarly 
turned phrase which made them fear he had been 
pulling their legs all the time. He seemed to be 
able to have faith in his religion and at the same time 
view with amusement the possibility that it was all 
a hoax. He seemed at times to kick over the 
elaborate edifice he had so laboriously built — to 
throw science and scientists to the winds — to wrap a 
cloak of humility protectively about him, with a twist 
like — " Perhaps the world is all a joke — but even so, 
it is evidently our job to make it a good joke." 
He wound up a letter to Tolstoy with some words like 
those in 1910, but Russia and Ireland are far apart ; 
Tolstoy was busy making a religion of his own, with 
all laughs left out, and he only replied sadly : "I 
received a painful impression from the concluding 
words of your letter.'* 

These sudden steps from certainty are discon- 
certing to his disciples ; but they are the very breath 
of life to the old-fashioned fellow, rather muddled at 
the mystery of the world in which he finds himself, 
and glad to get confirmation for his impression 

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SHAW 

that it is all very puzzling and that the best he can 
do is to plug along hopefully in his own way, and 
give new gods a wide berth. When Shaw comes 
across any such man he seems to face right about 
from all his theories, and say : " It's rough going, 
old man, and we seem a bit off the track, but it's a 
great thing to feel we're all in the same blooming 
bus." This, at any rate, is the savour which rises 
from those touches of human sympathy that flash 
out in delicious asides through the action of his 
plays, particularly among the minor characters. 
He is at home with everyone, and even when he is 
going all out to mobilise humanity to march ahead 
with him under the banner of Creative Evolution, 
he is turning his head to shout after those going 
steadfastly in the opposite direction — Stick to it, 
boys, you're just as right as I am. There is no use 
making much of this anomaly, just yet, lest he 
retort, " But isn't this what I have been protesting 
against for fifty years? You are trying to work 
me out like an equation. I am not a sum. I'm 
alive." 

All his dramatic work has to do with the slaves 
and gods and their pictures, but there is no prescrip- 
tion. There may be only one Glass II god as in 
Arms and the Man, or one Glass I god as in St. Joan 
or there may be one of each as in Man and Superma 
and The Millionairess. And even the gods are liable 
to show slavish traits at times, and the slaves to 
give a gleam of god-like quality. He makes a play 

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SHAW 

by taking a group of ordinary individuals — Class I 
and Class II slaves — and turning them inside out. 
It is all done wittily, kindly, thoroughly, sometimes 
with the assistance of a Class II god and sometimes — 
but what's the use of trying to take that wonderful 
process apart when it is there to be revelled in at 
the source, for two shillings a copy. It is surprising 
value for money ; why, to watch him getting a play 
going and plunging his audience into the thick of the 
story before the curtain is up ten seconds is worth 
every penny of it. 

He was studying the theatre and its possibilities 
as a revolutionary agency with the greatest interest, 
in the closing years of the century. For during those 
years his faith in the possibilities of social reform 
through political action was slowly dwindling. He 
was turning against Social Democracy as he found 
it in the flesh. He was testing his ideal of the 
'eighties against the facts, and finding them wanting. 
The paragraph quoted above from The Perfect 
Wagnerite shows how his thoughts were tending, 
and they came to a focus in Man a?id Superman in 
1902. 

It was a wonderful play. It was three plays — 
it was a dozen plays — or maybe a hundred. It was 
a good straight comedy, it was a domestic drama, 
it was a sporting play about a motor-race, it was a 
mystery play, it was a play about a baby, it was a 
play for any audience. It is impossible to describe 
the effect of that startHng, compact, subtle attack 

152 



SHAW 

on basic convention and tradition ; it is impossible 
in these hard-boiled, thick-skinned days to convey- 
any impression of the tremors which ran through 
the theatre when the play was first presented in 
London (1905) and later in the provinces. The 
omission of the third act didn't matter, for its 
essentials saturated the others, and though no one 
could understand what Shaw was driving at, the 
sheer intensity of his thought made itself felt. Even 
if the meaning was hidden, it was evident he was 
saying something that was all the world to him, 
and saying it with remarkable emphasis. 

He was. He was summing up the results of 
twenty years' experience as a reformer, confessing 
failure of the old method, and trying for a new one. 
He looked back and said that reforms were useless 
till man had reformed himself, and looked forward 
and said that man couldn't reform himself till the 
Life Force had reformed him. He cleared the 
decks of everything else in a single sweep — or rather 
in a series of them called a Preface, a Philosophy, and a 
Revolutionist's Handbook. He did it with that magnifi- 
cent openness and thoroughness which is the joy and 
despair of his biographers — for it gives them the 
fullest inside information about him, and yet when 
they try to present it to the public, they find that 
it was ail so much better in the original. So 
here are some extracts from The Revolutionist's 
Handbook to show the turning-point that had been 
reached : 

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SHAW 

A Revolutionist is one who desires to discard 
the existing social order and try another . . . 

And yet 

Revolutions have never lightened the burden 
of tyranny : they have only shifted it to another 
shoulder. 

Are we then to repudiate Fabian methods 
and return to those of the barricader, or adopt 
those of the dynamitard and the assassin ? On 
the contrary, we are to recognise that both are 
fundamentally futile. 

We must therefore frankly give up the 
notion that Man as he exists is capable of net 
progress. There will always be an illusion of 
progress, because wherever we are conscious of 
an evil we remedy it, and therefore always seem 
to ourselves to be progressing, forgetting that 
most of the evils we see are the effects, finally 
become acute, of long-unnoticed retrogressions ; 
that our compromising remedies seldom fully 
recover the lost ground ; above all, that on 
the lines along which we are degenerating, good 
has become evil in our eyes, and is being undone 
in the name of progress precisely as evil is 
undone and replaced by good in the lines along 
which we are evolving. This indeed is the 
Illusion of Illusions ; for it gives us infallible 

154 



SHAW 

and appalling assurance that if our political 
ruin is to come, it will be effected by ardent 
reformers and supported by enthusiastic patriots 
as a series of necessary steps in our progress. 

Our only hope, then, is in evolution. Wc 
must replace the man by the superman. 

The cry for the Superman did not begin 
with Nietzsche, nor will it end with his vogue. 
But it has always been silenced by the same 
question : what kind of person is this Superman 
to be? 

What is really important in Man is the part 
of him that we do not yet understand. Of 
much of it we are not even conscious, just as 
we are not normally conscious of keeping up 
our circulation by our heart-pump, though if 
we neglect it we die. We are therefore driven 
to the conclusion that when we have carried 
selection as far as we can by rejecting from the 
list of eligible parents all persons who are 
uninteresting, unpromising, or blemished with- 
out any set-off, we shall still have to trust to the 
guidance of fancy {alias Voice of Nature) , both 
in the breeders and the parents, for that 
superiority in the unconscious self which will 
be the true characteristic of the Superman. 



155 



SHAW 

As to the method, what can be said as yet 
except that where there is a will, there is a way ? 
If there be no will, we are lost. That is a 
possibility for our crazy little empire, if not for 
the universe ; and as such possibilities are not 
to be entertained without despair, we must, 
whilst we survive, proceed on the assumption 
that we have still energy enough to not only will 
to live, but to will to live better. 

There is no public enthusiast alive of twenty 
years' practical democratic experience who 
believes in the political adequacy of the elec- 
torate or of the bodies it elects. The overthrow 
of the aristocrat has created the necessity for the 
Superman. 

The Revolutionist's Handbook is full of meat for 
to-day's eating. The Quintessence of Ibsenism had 
anticipated the new psychology with its introverts 
and inhibitions ; and Shaw had followed it up by 
showing that excellent psychological research could 
be done in parks and restaurants or any place where 
there were men and women not too much on guard ; 
the results were so interesting, and had such general 
application, that when he put them into plays they 
went down as well in Japan as in London. Now, 
on the basis of small-scale experiments in social 
and political work, he was reaching even more 
tremendous conclusions. Nearly thirty years before 

156 



SHAW 

Mussolini had noticed the " putrescent corpse of 
Liberty," it was being neatly laid out on a slab in 
the Handbook. Three years before the first paper on 
Relativity was read, Shaw had nailed up his thesis 
that man was a relative animal. Only the other day 
Sir James Jeans wrote : " It was left for twentieth- 
century physicists under the lead of Einstein, Bohr 
and Heisenberg to discover how large a subjective 
tinge entered into the nineteenth-century description 
of nature." Tinge ! Shaw entered the twentieth 
century shouting at the top of his voice that man 
was sunk to the eyebrows in subjectivity. He said 
bluntly that man always thought he was moving 
forward, but was in truth incapable of knowing 
whether he was or not. He actually called for a 
conference of enlightened persons to discuss what 
was to be done about breeding a superior type of 
man as the only way out of the tail-chasing mess ; 
at least Jack Tanner did so in his Revolutionist'' s 
Handbook. And then there was that incomparable 
first act, with Roebuck Ramsden, the modern 
thinker, backed by the bust of Spencer and the 
enlarged photograph of Huxley, saying : *' Let me 
tell you I was an advanced man before you were 
born," and Tanner's mischievous, maddening retort : 
" I knew it was a long time ago." How the audience 
roared with delight at that conflict of dignity and 
impudence — without a notion that it was watching 
the first onslaught of the tvv^entieth century on the 
nineteenth, of the relativists on the determinists. 

157 



SHAW 

And how they enjoyed its development a few seconds 
later : 

Tanner : . . . Cultivate a little impudence, 
Ramsden, and you will become quite a remark- 
able man. 

Ramsden : I have no 

Tanner : You have no desire for that sort of 

notoriety. Bless you, I knew that answer would 

come out as well as I know that a box of matches 

will come out of an automatic machine when I 

put a penny in the slot. . . . 

It was scandalously unfair, of course, to bring the 

poor old rationalist on the stage with his hands 

tied behind his back, and let the Life Force hit him 

in the face ; still that is what happens when a 

dramatist grows plays, instead of writing them to fit 

a framework. But no other plays grow like these, 

in which the Life Force slap-stick plays round at 

such a rate that it lays out even the Life Force 

prophet. There is no more deadly punch in this 

play than its final word : 

Ann (looking at him with fond pride and caressing 
his arm) : Never mind her, dear. Go on talking. 
Tanner : Talking ! 

( Universal laughter,) 

And the final curtain comes down on an audience 

once again a little bewildered and dizzy. *' What 

does he mean ? ' Talking ' — Is he making fun of us 

after all ? " 

They could not be certain. And still less could 

158 



SHAW 

they see that his whole point was that there was no 
certainty. There was a possibiUty that Man was 
lost, but that was not a thing to be told to a crowd 
of people, out for an evening's entertainment. It 
was enough to give them a hint and cover it up in 
" Universal laughter," but the facts were faced 
frankly enough in the Handbook. 

Society was failing to make itself. Man was not 
yet up to the mark. Democracy in practice was a 
failure. The New Protestantism would not become 
politically practicable till the Life Force had shot 
forth a new race of men. Meanwhile, the pioneers 
must labour as inspiration dictated. Inspiration 
came from the instincts — the impulses — the will. 
Reliance on reason had been fatal, and rationalism 
was slowly freezing over the natural outlets of the 
human spirit. The will must come first. Jack 
Tanner puts it neatly in his Handbook, " The man 
who listens to Reason is lost. Reason enslaves all 
whose minds are not strong enough to master her,'* 
as who should say, " Vernuft ist der Teufel's hochstc 
Hure." 

The New Protestantism rests on the divine right 
of private intuition. Reason, which at once rises in 
revolt against a religion which would make her 
play second fiddle, must be kept sternly in check. 
She has her uses in the practical domain, but the 
new prophets will not allow her to approach the 
inner sanctum where Truth lies in the arms of the 
Life Force. 

159 



S H A W 

Shaw quite openly looked on himself as a New 
Prophet. It was clear to him that it was so, and 
there was no need to be coy about it. The terrific 
self-assertiveness which sprang from this presump- 
tion kept him in constant hot water, but he didn't 
mind — not even when it chilled and he was told in 
icy tones that his behaviour was " bad form." It 
must be remembered that this was in the Edwardian 
period. Difficulties about Africa had been settled 
to the satisfaction of the statesmen of Europe ; the 
Empire was bigger and better than ever ; sofas were 
going out, and Chesterfields were coming in ; silks 
were getting softer and carpets thicker ; the Forsytes 
had weathered the storms of the 'eighties, and all 
round capital appreciation was in sight. Only those 
who belong to the bicycle age can understand what 
the phrase " bad form " meant in that England. 
It was the whole ten commandments in two words, 
and Shaw's " What is bad form to-day will be good 
form to-morrow" was as blasphemous as it was 
incomprehensible. He was beginning to practise 
his religion in real earnest by giving the most 
vehement and most public utterance he could of 
the truth that was in him. 

Yet never was there a more considerate prophet. 
He almost eflfaces himself to give other prophets a 
chance. There is no paradox here, but only that 
strict logic which he always uses in practical matters. 
His religion demands that he must not only put 
forward his views with the utmost vigour, but 

i6o 



SHAW 

also that he encourage others to do likewise. 
Emphatic statement is essential, but tolerance 
must march along with it or even ahead of it. 
All opinions, all art, all activities, so long as they 
are honest, are equally valuable, till time sorts 
out one from the others to build on it. So, a Life 
Force prophet must beware of behttlement. There 
is always the possibility that he may be a mistake, 
and the other fellow the truth bearer. This is a 
hard saying, but it is one that Shaw lives up to with 
the most bewildering humiHty : it is impossible to 
find clear proof of this in his own works, but all 
young writers who have met him bear witness to it. 
He seems to go out of his way to help those who 
differ from him, though not without an occasional 
mischievous twitch or two to test how firmly they 
sit on the saddle. He wants artists to have absolute 
freedom of expression even when he is wild with 
them. In 1892, seeing Ellen Terry engaged in some 
trivial part, he wrote : 

" I was furious. If I had been a god and had 
created her powers for her, I should have 
interrupted the performance with thunder, and 
asked in a fearful voice why she was wasting the 
sacred fire of which I had made her the trustee. 
But I knew she had made her powers herself 
and could be called to account by nobody for 
the use she made of them." 
He went ahead with great gusto after he had nailed 
his colours to the mast in 1 903 . He claimed freedom 

161 



SHAW 

for himself and for everyone else, and then set 
out to precipitate discussion on the proper regulation 
of this freedom in the best interests of the Life Force. 
What he really wanted was a nicely regulated 
Anarchism called Communism, but there is no use 
taunting him with this. He is well aware that his 
real problem is to know how much nonsense to 
stand from a superman before rounding on him. 

He not only worked for the Life Force, but worked 
with it ; or rather it worked with him. He doesn't 
write plays — he grows them — he lives in the mind 
and heart of each of his characters in turn, and 
while that character is speaking, he and Shaw are, 
in a way, one person. Other artists have done the 
same thing, but not so thoroughly ; there is usually 
a real man to be found behind the play figures. In 
Shaw's plays there is only the Life Force aiming at 
nothing in particular, and everything in general. 
Or rather aiming at having the new religion accepted 
and everything that stands in its way rejected. The 
teaching is always well wrapped up — actors and 
audience get what they like — there are plenty of 
laughs and interesting situations ; but these things 
are only secondary to the main purpose of getting 
people to revise their views about marriage, punish- 
ment, criticism, history, politics and reHgion ; Shaw 
wanted them to look at things in the Life Force 
way instead of in the Christian way ; for the progress 
of the reforms he desired was being barred in all 
directions, by convictions based on Christian dogma. 

162 



SHAW 

It is not suggested for a moment that Shaw 
altogether scorned Christianity. He pointed out 
that Christ was a Life Force failure, but he always 
esteemed certain aspects of Christian teaching and 
frequently spoke highly of its social value. His 
pages are sprinkled with acknowledgments like : 
" I see no way out of the world's misery but the way 
that would have been found by Christ's will, if he 
had undertaken the work of a modern practical 
statesman " {Prefaces^ p. 525). What he objected to, 
was the way in which people held on to the beliefs 
of A.D. 190 in the year 1900. He found these beliefs 
embedded in the social body, hidden and tenacious 
as the steel mesh in a great arch ; he saw that they 
were the real obstacle to reforms which he con- 
sidered essential ; and he made no bones about 
attacking them. From Major Barbara (1905) to 
Ths Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1935) he has 
waged a steady campaign against them, preaching 
his alternative creed of life for life's sake. 

But no one took him seriously. The Great War 
came and went and he hardly even changed his 
stance. People scarcely noticed Androcles and the 
Lion or its Preface. The play was a great success, 
for everyone liked to see a lion chase an emperor 
all over the place ; but it was not so easy to see that 
the play was a serious attempt to show the Life Force 
in action. Later, when Back to Methuselah was pro- 
duced and published with labelled diagrams of his 
creed in every scene and page, people only yawned. 

163 



SHAW 

Then came the palpitating Life Force thriller, 
St. Joan. In London this was supposed to be a 
Christian play, because of the title, but there is a 
lack of internal evidence. The Joan of the play is 
a little like Lavinia who wasn't much of a Christian 
either — Androcles was worth ten of her. Joan is 
nothing but the physical receptacle of the Life Force 
striving onward and upward. As a Christian she 
lets the play down completely. Why, at the crucial 
point of the final act — the tearing up of her recanta- 
tion — she makes a farce of the whole magnificent 
trial scene by talking like a second-rate nature poet, 
** if only I could still hear the wind in the trees, 
the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying 
through the healthy forest, and the blessed, blessed 
church bells that send my angel voice floating to 
me on the wind." Why, the minute any Inquisitor, 
who knew his business, heard that line, he'd have 
boxed the little impostor's ears and told her to get 
home to blazes and stop wasting his time. It doesn't 
need the Epilogue to ruin the play as a Christian 
epic. 

He explains it all in the Prologue. Joan is a 
temporary materialisation of the Life Force endowed 
with an excessive evolutionary appetite. She is 
morally indistinguishable from the competent richy- 
bichy Epifania — the MilHonairess. Each of them 
" has the vitality to make her instincts imperious." 
Each of them is an irrational appetite going after 
what it wants. Joan's actions look *' higher," but 

164 



SHAW 

in a Life Force world that is only a relative impres- 
sion. In fact, Epifania, with her business sense, her 
energy and her talent for cutting out superfluous 
parts in the process of production, may yet come to 
be honoured as a superior type of female. Already 
the Joans who believe in God are being liquidated, 
and the Epifanias who believe in Efficiency promoted 
to executive positions in the new anti-Christian 
states. 

This, of course, is horrible. But there is no use in 
running away from facts when they are unpleasant, 
or from hard thinking when it leads to curious conclu- 
sions. When a man starts with an impersonal Force 
enmeshed in matter, he winds up — if he is honest — 
with a pulpy world churned up by puppets who know 
neither good nor evil, nor anything but their own 
darkened wills. 

No more need be said here of the playwright and 
the New Protestantism. It has now plenty of 
devotees and Shaw touches truth when he calls 
himself " the iconographer of the religion of my 
time." He has been its champion, but no one sees 
better its fatal weakness — its insoluble problem. 
He tries unceasingly for a solution. He tried in 
the Preface on Bosses (1935) but he got no further 
than in the Preface to the Sanity of Art (1907) when 
he wrote : 

I know no harder practical question than 
how much selfishness one ought to stand from 
a gifted person for the sake of his gifts, or on the 

165 



SHAW 

chance of his being right in the long run. The 
Superman will certainly come like a thief in the 
night, and be shot at accordingly ; but we 
cannot leave our property wholly undefended 
on that account. On the other hand, we cannot 
ask the Superman simply to add a higher set of 
virtues to current respectable morals ; for he is 
undoubtedly going to empty a good deal of 
respectable morality out like so much dirty 
water, and replace it by new and strange 
customs, shedding old obligations, and accepting 
new and heavier ones. Every step of his 
progress must horrify conventional people ; and 
if it were possible for even the most superior 
man to march ahead all the time, every pioneer 
of the march towards the Superman would be 
crucified . 
You never can tell — with Supermen. 



1 66 



CHAPTER VII 

Shaw is right. It is impossible in the dark 
cul-de-sac of Creative Evolution to know what to do 
about Supermen, Superwomen and Bosses generally. 
In that half-lit gloom, a man never can tell who's 
who, or even what's what. But why should he 
remain there ? Why should he stay amid the 
topsy-turvy jigsaw if he claims to be a freethinker ? 
Why should freethinkers cling to outworn dogmas 
which tie them down ? Surely their datum should 
be Freedom, and not the dogma of the Propagation 
of Species wrapped up in some odds and ends stolen 
from the Christian wardrobe. 

Who will write that great book — Fun among the 
Freethinkers ? Professor Bury might have turned it 
out a few years ago, but he missed his chance. He 
took the freethinkers seriously, and wrote A History 
of Free Thought, 600 b.c.-a.d. 1912, instead. He 
set out valiantly to be the champion of thought, but 
that, as Shaw saw long ago, is a very slippery 
business. Many a man sets out bravely to blow 
thought's trumpet, and winds up sadly on his own 
horn ; but even that is better than falling in at the 
tail end of an Orange procession as Bury did. He 
meant well, but he only succeeded in showing how 

167 



SHAW 

elegantly a man of vast learning could say *' To 
hell with the Pope," and how evenly he could 
match the steady thump of the Belfast drum as he 
swung from " the lurid policy of coercion which the 
Christian Church adopted " to "a velocity which 
would have seemed diabolical to the slaves of the 
medieval Church. He simply ate the spiritual food 
which Gibbon offered in an uncritical mood. 

The freethinkers have failed thought. They don't 
think hard enough or freely enough, and they can't 
keep straight. They go off on sidelines of their own, 
scofhng at their pet antipathies or else trying to 
make a new religion out of their pet fancies. Take 
Herbert Spencer, one of the best of the old brigade. 
He went his way trying to scatter the mists and get 
down to something solid . He quarried back through 
time and space in the regular way, till he could get 
no further, and then said that beyond lay the 
Unknowable. He decided reasonably enough that 
there was no use trying to get any information about 
a God that was unknowable, and then followed this 
up, not so reasonably, with " therefore theology is a 
self-destructive science." And then he began to set 
out First Principles, showing conclusively that the 
Unknowable was in general orderly and beneficent, 
and in particular that It had the best interests of the 
English upper middle classes at heart; It disliked 
militarism and doted on industrialism ; It was, in 
fact, rather like Herbert Spencer. 

All this went on chapter after chapter, and the cry 

1 68 



SHAW 

was taken up by Ramsden and the rest of them 
without even a smile ; till Shaw came along in a gale 
of laughter, and single-handed set out to free the 
public mind from the bondage of Spencer and 
Tyndall, and others less gifted, who were busily 
scuttling the ship of thought under the impression 
that they were sailing it towards the Great Awaken- 
ing. But then, instead of being content with his 
obvious job of mental masseur — instead of letting that 
magnificent analytic gift rip into all the fakes of the 
age to our dismay and delight — instead of sticking to 
the things he could do so well — he took up theology 
and went headlong down the same trap as Herbert 
Spencer. With no capacity for abstract generalisa- 
tion, with a knowledge of science only surpassed in 
superficiality by his knowledge of Christianity, with 
the eagerness and innocence of a child, he plunged 
into a reformation campaign on behalf of a growing 
synthetic God called the Life Force. It might just 
as well be called Shaw. It is incalculable, it seeks 
beauty and truth, it works by trial and error, it 
makes mistakes and it is not in the least ashamed of 
being inconsistent. In the exercise of these attri- 
butes it has produced an irrational universe which 
it ignores in its preoccupation with a speck called 
the earth where it fluked into self-consciousness 
{via the giraflfe) , and where, after a series of unsuc- 
cessful eflforts at social organisation, it has been 
greatly encouraged by the success of its most recent 
experiment in Russia. 

169 



SHAW 

What chance has thought of freedom once it gets 
tangled up in this maze of home-made theology ? 
What is the use of throwing out water, however dirty, 
to drink from a spring befouled at its very source 
by a Power impersonal but purposeful ? And how 
can thought keep calm and collected when it looks 
facts starkly in the face, and finds that the said 
Power, with all eternity to experiment in, has only 
within human memory managed to replace buttons 
by zip fasteners ? Yet this Power — this Life Force — 
is the datum of the outstanding nineteenth-twentieth 
century freethinker. He claims that his creed is 
based on science, and has spent a lifetime trying to 
get people to found their institutions on " a genuinely 
scientific natural history" (Prefaces^ p. 703). He 
wants sound ideas to " survive and be added to the 
body of ascertained knowledge we call Science " 
{Prefaces, p. 6 1 3) . There is evidently a frightful mess 
somewhere. Free thinking, which should be a 
glorious, uncramped, out-thrust of the mind, has, 
for evolution worshippers, become a sort of mental 
debauchery on a Life Force treadmill. A modern 
freethinker is about as free as a freewheel, it moves 
about a fixed centre and turns only in one way — 
away from facts, away from common sense, away 
from reality. 

There is one sound idea which has now survived 
for nearly a century and shows every sign of surviving 
for ever ; but those who adore the Life Force reject 
it. It was " added to the body of ascertained 

170 



SHAW 

knowledge we call science " before Shaw was born, 
and has slowly but surely gained such a commanding 
position that all old laws acknowledge it or perish, 
and all new laws bow to it before admission. The 
ordinary man knows this law so well that he doesn't 
notice it. He relies on it to make things hot or keep 
them cool just as he relies on the law of gravitation 
to keep things in place when he uses a paperweight. 
Engineers find the idea infinitely reliable and call 
it the second law of thermodynamics, but this need 
not disturb the layman. He knows, just as well as 
any engineer, that the sitting-room fire will go out 
if he doesn't put on coal, and that his coffee gets 
cooler as he reads his morning paper ; even if he 
uses a thermos jug or a radium quilted cosy, he isn't 
fool enough to think that he can keep his coffee 
warm for ever. He may know that he could heat 
the coffee by stirring it, but, if he does, he also knows 
that he would be fighting a losing battle. The 
engineer says that the universe tends towards 
thermal equilibrium, or, if he wants to be frank, 
that material energy is fizzling out. We are living 
in a world where things get colder and colder. 
This straightforward summing up is as good a way 
as another of regarding the most reliable and 
inexorable of scientific laws ; it is the next thing 
to omnipotent ; it governs all actions connected 
with food, clothing and shelter ; every ship, every 
train, every motor-car, every aeroplane, depends 
upon it from minute to minute and day to day. 

171 



SHAW 

And it is perfectly dependable ; it seems a nuisance 
to those who are trying to keep the soup warm, 
but they must remember that they could never 
have warmed the soup at all if the kitchen stove 
had not been willing to get cooler, and let them 
also remember that what they lose on the soup they 
make up on the ices. Everyone believes in the 
second law of thermodynamics whether he knows 
it or not ; he is as sure of it as he is that the sun 
will rise to-morrow morning, and continue to part 
with some of its heat to keep him alive ; it is the 
most certain of all the laws of science ; all pheno- 
mena move smoothly to its bidding, nowhere has a 
single event been found to conflict with it, all 
movement, all energy, all warmth, all physical life, 
is in its keeping ; it has a right to rule the domain 
of science which no sensible man can question. 
To thrust it aside is to thrust science aside, but to 
acknowledge it is to ruin evolution as a religion. 
There is here an obvious dilemma, but it does not 
seem to worry either the Communists or the 
Racialists or even British biologists who face both 
ways for the Advancement of Science. Neither 
Russians nor Germans nor the others seem to be so 
fully aware of the dilemma as Shaw, but he, as will 
be seen in the next chapter, appears to be able to 
face both ways with comparative comfort. 

The evolution worshippers try to evade the law 
by refusing to admit facts and be ruled by reason. 
They argue that it is not right to apply universally 

172 



SHAW 

the conclusions reached from laboratory experiments 
or from observations limited to the surface of the 
earth. This would be fair enough if they stuck to 
their guns. But they daren't. They argue this in 
one breath and in the next they extol Galileo and 
Newton for jumping to conclusions about the 
universe from observations on a pendulum and a 
falling apple. And then after a few jibes at the 
ecclesiastics who tried to obscure the work of Galileo 
they come back and do their little best to obscure 
the splendid work of Kelvin. They object to the 
conclusion that the universe requires a real God to 
keep it going, because it is derived from manoeuvres 
with a gas engine, a thermometer, a jug of water, 
a balance and some weights ; and yet at the same 
time they are working with a foot rule, a few fossils, 
some pigeons and a dozen sliced guinea pigs to 
demonstrate the existence of an eternal evolutionary 
God enmeshed in matter and for ever at the mercy 
of its unintelligence. They miss the ever-growing 
glory of Kelvin's synthesis as it spreads out from 
the laboratory, calmly taking all natural facts in 
its stride, and smoothly ordering every phenomena 
it meets. And they patch and twist Darwin's 
theory into an unrecognisable complexity as they 
feverishly try to make it fit the new knowledge which 
daily threatens to wreck the version they repaired 
only yesterday. They want things both ways, but 
they must eventually face facts and common sense, 
which unite to say that things are cooling down, 

173 



SHAW 

that the material world is dying ; that, if this law 
be not accepted as universally applicable, science 
has no authority even in its chosen sphere, and there 
is no ascertained knowledge, no evolution, no truth, 
no beauty, nothing but Man — as Ampere said — 
drowning helplessly in his own spit. On the other 
hand, if the law be accepted it is possible to find room 
for freedom, love, order and all other things Man 
cares for, there is even room for evolutionary 
theories, but evolutionary dogmas, evolutionary 
rehgions, and the Life Force God must go. 

All this was as well established in 1851 as it is 
to-day. But the scientific journalists, and even 
some of the scientists, were so busy with Lamarck, 
Darwin, Huxley and Haeckel, that they ignored the 
other great team — Carnot, Clausius, Joule and 
Kelvin. It was easier to learn to spell " proto- 
plasm " and " metabolism," and later, even " maso- 
chism," than to grasp the principles of physics. 
In 1887 Kelvin wrote : " I had the great pleasure 
for many years, beginning just forty years ago, 
of making experiments along with Joule, which 
led to some important results in the theory of 
thermodynamics. This is indeed one of the most 
valuable recollections of my life, and is indeed as 
valuable a recollection as I can conceive in the 
possession of any man interested in science," but 
people carefully ignored science when it affirmed 
the necessity for a Creator as the new physical 
synthesis did. They could not get enough of it 

174 



SHAW 



a few years later, when the new biological synthesis 
affirmed the opposite. Business was good, Man- 
chester—Joule's town — was getting ahead, there 
were fortunes to be made in ships and railways ; 
to the twinkling amusement of the stars, and the 
tumultuous laughter of the sun, men fell down in 
adoration before the steam engine, and up rose a 
mighty chorus : 

O Perfectly Reversible, 
We're very far from Thee. 
Lead on Thy slaves coercible 
To Great Efficiencee. 

Gathered about rocks and fossils and the internal 
organs of rabbits there were other groups of wor- 
shippers, rapidly growing unbalanced by the 
wonders unfolded to them, and forgetting that if 
science is not one, it is nothing. Word spread out, 
not so much from them as from their literary hangers- 
on, that Nature made itself, that miracles couldn't 
happen, and that the world was getting better and 
better. But there was no publicity at all for the 
other scientists, who, sticking closely to facts and 
straight thinking, were showing in the clearest 
possible way that material things couldn't create 
themselves, that Nature itself was a miracle, and 
that the world was slowly and surely running down. 

Science, smiling like the Cheshire cat, offered its 
devotees two vehicles. One was marked " Going 
Up " — a ramshackle conveyance with some essential 
links missing. The other was solid as a rock and 

175 



SHAW 

had everything spick and span, but was marked 
" Going Down." The joke was obvious enough ; 
but it had also hidden depths, for all the tools needed 
to start Bus No. i and keep it running were manu- 
factured and stored on Bus No. 2. 

There was a tremendous rush for the first Bus. 
Social Democrats, Anarchists, Marxists, Psycho- 
analysts, Uplifters, Lords and Ladies, Tired Business 
Men, Novelists, Dramatists and Poets offering paeans 
to the Life Force, all clambered aboard and started 
off at full speed. At least, the wheels began to go 
round at a great rate. Bus No. 2 was unpopular, for 
apart from the disconcerting sign, it contained only 
one non -upholstered compartment marked " For 
Hard Thinkers Only." Still it was boarded by a few 
audacious spirits — Michael Faraday dropped in for 
a little while to say good-bye to Clerk Maxwell ; 
Gregor Mendel Worked away by himself in a quiet 
corner. . . . 

The first Bus rattled away like mad till somewhere 
between the discovery of radium, in 1898, and the 
Treaty of Versailles, in 19 19, there were a series of 
smashes, and the passengers were finally thrown out, 
to find that the Bus hadn't budged an inch, and 
that Science, gradually vanishing and smiling more 
widely than ever, was offering them a new con- 
traption like a merry-go-round. The signs Up and 
Down were also vanishing, and a new sign — 
Going as you Please — was coming into view. The 
new roundabout was called Relativity, and there 

176 



SHAW 

were all sorts of seats in it, except Right seats. 
Passengers could think anything at all, provided 
they thought as they pleased, and didn't trouble too 
much about the real common-sense world. 

Thought was too hard a mistress. That was the 
core of the trouble. Man deserted her and sought 
more pliant and accommodating partners. He 
lured the lissom Intuition from her natural home, 
and went dancing with her towards the mountain- 
top . . . and suddenly found himself alone with 
the wild-eyed infant, Contradiction, clinging to him 
like a young octopus. Science split first into two, 
and then into ten thousand parts. The intelligentsia 
switched from " Every man his own priest " to 
" Every man his own scientist," and Metaphysical 
Vitalism was born. 

It works like this. The M.V. takes his stand on 
his favourite facts, and appeals for public support 
as a metabiological scientist and modern thinker. 
In due time an opponent collects enough conflicting 
facts to make mincemeat of the new thought, and 
just as he is doing this in a perfectly decent and 
rational way, he finds that the M.V. has bolted 
from reason and reality to his inner intuitional 
tabernacle, and is calling out in a voice charged 
with emotion : (i) that he is full of exultant resigna- 
tion, or (2 a) that he is proudly defiant of the tramp- 
ling march of unconscious power, or (2b) Down 
with Aristotle, or (3) Do let us be nice to one 
another, or (4) Down through the ages intolerance 

177 



SHAW 

has ever dug the grave of truth, or (5) Wretch ! 
Viper ! ! Muck raker !!!... There are as many 
defences against facts as there are Metaphysical 
VitaHsts, but they are all aHke in their flight from 
reason, and their appeal to emotion. Shaw's 
counter to Kelvin was a song and dance to the tune — 
Away with Melancholy, trust the Life Force. {Pen 
Portraits and Reviews ^ p. 165.) 

The old science was founded on faith in the 
uniformity of Nature, or in other words, the dogma 
of the GOODNESS OF God. The new science of Bus 
No. I started from the dogma of the Propagation of 
Species. The trouble did not begin there either, 
for the split in science was brewing from the time 
when real faith began to evaporate, and Newton 
began to turn Unitarian because he couldn't find an 
equation for the Trinity. The drying-up process 
was slow, and science was able to live on the savings 
of the past while it advanced by leaps and bounds 
towards the twentieth century. Then the really 
mad part of the story started. Scientific laws had 
been gradually removed from their natural founda- 
tion and based on the notion that all events were 
entirely " caused " by other events. A Scotchman 
had pointed out that this was nothing but a hunch, 
and scientists, rather flummoxed and unwilHng to 
retrace their steps, had to dignify the hunch by 
giving it names like " vital intuition " and " inex- 
pugnable belief" Science, running away from 
metaphysics, continued its headlong charge faster 

178 



SHAW 

and faster, but now a little bit like a horse on roller 
skates. 

Not only were the laws lifted from their natural 
resting-place, but — here the story gets madder still — 
the book-bred brigade, that had learnt a few of the 
laws by heart, began to use them as pickaxes to 
remove the foundations altogether. They spread 
abroad the new faith that a real Creator was 
unnecessary, and that an imaginary Creator, 
trampling and blundering along, was the only God 
fit for the modern mind. The old idea of a God 
that saves men was discarded for the new one of 
men that save God. The inner circle began 
" disencumbering Christianity from the accretions 
which deform it,'* and " redistilling the eternal 
spirit of religion." Even genuine scientists became 
affected, and some are now to be found patting 
Nature reproachfully on the head and telling her 
that she is not very Efficient. For instance (see 
JVaturCy June i6th, 1934, p. 897) : 

The protection for the embryos is admirable, 
but almost over-ingenious since the object in 
view — the propagation of the species — is some- 
what defeated when so many good seedlings 
must eventually perish. 
This is science of the twentieth century ; the facts 
are admitted but they are " defeating the object in 
view." An old-fashioned scientist would have said, 
" We must alter our opinion about the object in 
view," and an ordinary man with normal common 

179 



SHAW 

sense would say that Nature is on her knees to him, 
begging him, beseeching him, to notice that she 
is a prodigal mother ; that she does everything on a 
lavish, magnificent scale ; that she hates " efficiency" ; 
that she throws the very energy of the sun wildly 
in all directions into space, so that the one tiny 
morsel on which man is born may be nourished and 
give forth wheat, coal, and everything he needs in 
reckless abundance. This view may be only a 
provisional hypothesis, but it fits the facts ; it is the 
normal view which a man would take if he hadn't 
received a modern secular-sectarian education, and 
if he got a chance to look at the phenomena about 
him sensibly, but it is no longer scientific because 
everything must be trimmed to fit the dogma of the 
Propagation of Species. Common sense is no longer 
of any use. Nature is defeating the object she 
has in view ! She is, in fact, " bad form," but 
now that this has been pointed out in a great scientific 
journal. Nature will presumably have to mend her 
ways and be governed as nearly as possible as we 
might suppose her to govern herself were she in her 
right mind. 

It is not easy for an evolution-obsessed generation 
to see that Christianity is all of a piece, and that it 
is impossible to get ahead by taking over the parts 
of it that attract, combining them with the latest 
scientific news, and calling the result the religion 
of the twentieth century. Shaw can't see it even 
yet. He said in 1910 : 

180 



SHAW 

To me God does not yet exist ; but there 
is a creative force constantly struggling to 
evolve an executive organ of god-like knowledge 
and power. ... To my mind unless we 
conceive God as engaged in a continual struggle 
to surpass himself— as striving at every birth 
to make a better man than before — we are 
conceiving nothing better than an omnipotent 
snob. (Letter to Count Tolstoy, quoted in 
Henderson's Bernard Shaw, p. 529.) 
and he was still at it by proxy in 1932 : 

*^ My own beUef is that he is not all he sets 
up to be. He's not properly made and finished 
yet. There's somethin' in us that's dhrivin' at 
him, and somethin' out of us that's dhrivin' 
at him, that's certain ; and the only other thing 
that's certain is that the somethin' makes plenty 
of mistakes in thryin' to get there. ..." 
Nothing would ever persuade him that God 
w^as anything more solid and satisfactory than 
an eternal, but as yet unfulfilled, purpose. 
{Adventures of Black Girl, p. 55.) 
This may be very convincing to men over fifty, 
but children want to know why they should care 
about a Force which doesn't care about them, and 
why they should trust a God that is still experi- 
menting with matter and still making mistakes — 
earthquakes, for instance — after having had all 
eternity to practise in. Why should a boy of spirit 
make himself the slave of a deity who may have a 

181 



SHAW 

cosmic sneeze any day, and send the solar system 
to smithereens (see Chapter X, *' Exploding Stars '* 
in any modern Astronomy) . The God of Creative 
Evolution can't stand on its own legs one minute 
before any sensible boy's curiosity. The God of 
Creative Evolution crumples up daily and Shaw has 
had to borrow from Christianity all along the line, 
the wherewithal to prop up his deity and make it 
presentable. 

He launched the Life Force in the first place by 
taking the first and last articles of the Apostles' 
Creed and thinning them down into forms which 
couldn't possibly startle anyone. Then he brought 
old-fashioned words and phrases into the evolu- 
tionary swim with such word-play as — " Conscience 
is the most powerful of all the instincts, and the love 
of God is the most powerful of all the passions " 
{The Christian Commonwealth, July 20th, 191 o). 
Later he dressed up his deity in scraps torn from 
St. Paul and St. Thomas Aquinas ; as in the 
Epilogue to Back to Methuselah when Lilith tells 
how Man and Woman : 

Press on to the goal of redemption from the 
flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the 
whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the 
world began, was a whirlpool in pure force. 
Only the year before last (1935) he borrowed the 
Day of Judgment ; but the most audacious borrow- 
ing of all was done when he kidnapped St. Joan to 
exploit her as a sample of supercharged Life Force 

182 



SHAW 



groping its way towards " higher things '* . . . and 
yet, in a sense, it may also be said that St. Joan 
borrowed Shaw to write a play in her honour and in 
justice to her age — but she let him write the Preface 
and the Epilogue himself ! 

Here again is that elusiveness, that duality, which 
evades analysis. He borrows, but he gives back 
. . . and then takes away again. He raises his 
hands in reverence, and puts his fingers to his nose 
in a single gesture. He bases his religion on science, 
and then makes his science a laughing-stock by 
grouping phenomena into ** facts " and " mistakes." 
He travels with the crowd on Bus No. i, and yet he 
is not of it. He is a freethinker, but he does not 
delude himself like the other passengers that he is 
ruled by reason. When he falls back on his 
emotional hunch and says. Trust the Life Force, he 
is not, like others, beating a retreat, but re-entrench- 
ing himself at his starting-point. He knows that 
the others are fooling themselves by finding reasons 
for what they have already decided to believe or 
disbelieve ; and his mischievous sallies on this point 
fill them with speechless indignation. 

Shaw began by kicking reason out of the front 
door and then he rushed to the back door to 
let her in. He can't get on without her, but he 
likes to pretend he can by admitting her under new 
names, like " conscience " and " self-control." 
He wrestles mightily and unceasingly with her, 
moving so swiftly that no one has ever been able 

183 



SHAW 

to label him " This side up." An unwary opponent 
once tried to get the better of him with " But, 
Mr. Shaw, you speak Hke two separate persons," 
and was dumbfounded by the reply, " Why only 
two ? " 

He has never abandoned the stand he took up in 
the Quintessence of Ibsenism, where he argued that 
" the will " has the first word and the last word, 
and that reason is only so much mechanism for 
subordinate uses. " Only the other day our highest 
boast was that we were reasonable human beings. 
To-day we laugh at that conceit and see ourselves 
as wilful creatures." That was when he was thirty- 
three. At thirty-nine he was still able to write, on 
p. 323 in The Sanity of Art, " life is the satisfaction 
of a passion in us of which we can give no rational 
account whatever," and " the setting up of reason 
above will is a damnable error," but this was after 
he had hobbled the will on p. 321 with: "The 
moral evolution of the social individual is from 
submission and obedience as economisers of effort 
and responsibility, and safeguards against panic 
and incontinence, to wilfulness and self-assertion 
made safe by reason and self-control," and " With- 
out high gifts of reason and self-control, that is, 
without common sense, no man dares yet trust 
himself out of the school of authority." In 
192 1 after the Hang-the-Kaiser election and the 
Treaty of Versailles, he put on still heavier hobbles 
with : 

184 



SHAW 
THE GREATEST OF THESE IS SELF-CONTROL 

As there is no place in Darwinism for free 
will, or any other sort of will, the Neo-Dar- 
winists held that there is no such thing as self- 
control. Yet self-control is just the one quality 
of survival value which circumstantial selection 
must invariably and inevitably develop in the 
long run. . . . What is self-control ? It is 
nothing but a highly developed vital sense, 
dominating and regulating the mere appetites. 
To overlook the very existence of this supreme 
sense ; to miss the obvious inference that it is 
the quahty that distinguishes the fittest to 
survive ; to omit, in short, the highest moral 
claim of Evolutionary Selection : all this, which 
the Neo-Darwinians did in the name of Natural 
Selection, showed the most pitiable want of 
mastery of their own subject, the dullest lack 
of observation of the forces upon which Natural 
Selection works. {Prefaces, p. 504.) 
The wrestling match never ceases. In the last 
passage, reason seems to be winning hands down, 
but one never can tell with Shaw. She may be 
winded any minute by a jab like " Conscience is the 
most powerful of all the instincts," or paralysed by 
a sudden twist like " We still have the silly habit of 
talking or thinking as if intellect were a mechanical 
process and not a passion." It is impossible to 
follow the ups and downs of this contest, for, as can 
be seen, and as will be shown more clearly in the next 

185 



SHAW 

chapter, he makes his own meanings for words as he 
goes along. The " will " appears to be sometimes an 
undefinable mystery, sometimes one of the sensitive 
appetites, sometimes intuition, sometimes what 
people call the heart, but never the rational appetite. 
This being so, he is on firm ground when he says 
that the setting up of reason over " will " is a 
damnable error. It certainly is. It has been 
responsible for most of the heresies which have 
afflicted Christendom ; the rest being due to the 
diaboHcal error of setting up " will " over reason. 
Shaw is the only man of note who has ever been able 
to take a hand in both heresies simultaneously, or 
at least on alternate days, and it must make him 
feel like a lot of different persons — but two is enough. 
He is perfectly reasonable about everything but 
reason, and a great freethinker about everything 
but thought ; still, she will beat him in the end 
and grind to dust everything in him that does not 
pass fairly through her mill. Some minds may 
be temporarily paralysed by the strain of trying 
to assess all human faculties in terms of " survival 
value," but this fashion will pass. Or, if it does not, 
and if men will not be taught by common sense 
and reason that Bus No. i never brings its passengers 
anywhere, they will inevitably find themselves being 
taught by the brutal and primitive process of trial 
and error. 1 9 1 4- 1 9 1 8 was only a trial in a tea-cup ; 
the next event, for which preparations are now being 
so feverishly made in Europe, wiU be an error on a 

186 



SHAW 

new scale — a mighty smash if it comes off— but 
such smashes are all in the day's work for the Life 
Force. 

For the Life Force Bus is still on the road. It 
has been amalgamated with the Merry-go-round, 
and become a Phantom Bus for Materialistic 
Mystics. Within it, survival- value is the only value, 
and trial-and-error the only test of truth. It is 
curious that Shaw should be so absolutely wrong 
and yet so relatively right ; it is as though he had 
been born aboard that Bus and, in his indomitable 
efforts to make it into a true home for men, had 
revealed its absurdity. What passengers it carries ! 
Some try to travel with it, keeping one foot on the 
running board and the other on solid ground ; some, 
in priestly robes, try to Christianise the Bus with 
one hand while they Modernise their churches with 
the other ; some try to grab the wheel and drive 
anywhere, just for the sake of driving ; some try, 
humourlessly, to drive onward and upward ; some 
try to collect the guns and keep order ; but the vast 
majority say " we've only one life to live " and make 
for the seats with the most luscious looking-uphols- 
tery. Shaw, the playwright, has had his eye on the 
whole unwicked-unholy cargo of them for fifty 
years, and has given us a wonderful picture of the 
antics of one elegant group as they flirt and fiddle 
in a cosy corner. It is called Heartbreak Home. 

It is curious, too, to see how some of his dreams 
have come true. The Supermen have arrived and 

187 



SHAW 

every step of their progress is horrifying conventional 
people, respectable morality has been emptied out 
and replaced by new and strange customs, marriage 
has been modernised, kings have been kicked out, 
old obligations have been shed. It is, as Shaw said 
in 1897, impossible to make omelettes without 
breaking eggs, but since then eggs have been 
smashed by the million all over Europe and where 
are the omelettes ? In Russia ? In Germany ? Or 
perhaps in Spain ? It is easy to see the Life Force 
at work in its own peculiar way on these fronts, and 
there are plenty of crushed shells on its track, but 
what has it brought forth that a free man with hope 
in his heart cares to eat ? 

It is worth considering some of these terrible 
attempts at omelette-making. It is difficult to get 
reliable information from Russia but it may be 
assumed that M. Andre Gide, who has been studying 
conditions there, would not be easily misled nor 
willing to make things appear worse than they are. 
It is well to remember here, that Shaw and Webb 
see in the Russian experiment the partial reaUsation 
of their dearest hopes of the 'eighties, and the 
practical demonstration of the value of their Life 
Force (or Social Organism) teaching. Webb has 
recently written a book to show how splendidly the 
Communist experiment is progressing, and Shaw 
puts on his most beautifully tinted spectacles when 
he writes of the wonderful work of the Soviets : 
" Now Russia has shot ahead of all the Powers in 

188 



SHAW 

combining an intense public activity with an exten- 
sion of popular initiative and individual freedom 
beyond the power of workers under Liberal Capital- 
ism ever to conceive " (G.B.S. in G. K's Weekly^ 
March 21st, 1935). M. Gide, summing up in 1937 
what he actually observed in Russia, says that 
nowhere in the world is " the spirit less free, more 
humiliated, more terrorised, more enslaved." 

Or take the facts and judge for yourself. Read 
the Preface to The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles and 
see how a man who all his life has fought for 
humanity against cruelty and bestiality can allow 
the Life Force belief to steel his heart and cloud 
his mind, as he writes to defend Russian terrorism 
and excuse mass butcheries. And then read some 
reliable report of the recent execution of the group 
of outstanding army officers and try to assess the 
value of this latest outburst of egg-breaking. Is it 
a glorious demonstration of the advance of the 
human spirit or is it something fiendish ? Is the 
Soviet chorus of demanding the death of the 
" poisonous pygmies " and calling for " a cur's 
death for curs " a dignified accompaniment to 
the administration of justice ? Is the outpouring 
of the Bolshevist poet laureate Biedny : " We are 
ashamed of the mothers who bred such dirty dogs. 
These curs have poked their muzzles into the 
Fascist food trough " — and all the rest of it, likely 
to raise the standard of Russian literature ? These 
are points on which the normal man is just as 

189 



SHAW 

competent to give a useful opinion as any literary 
genius. And, even on the " survival-value " theory, 
it is the normal man who will in the long run decide 
whether the omelettes are eatable. 

The way of the Life Force in Germany is not so 
very different. The rulers there use internment 
camps instead of explosive bullets, but they are 
equally insistent on replacing the Trinity by the 
State, and, to that end, are waging a strong cam- 
paign to smash ancient beliefs and produce a 
national sentiment which is simply the New Protes- 
tantism in a politically practicable form. In Russia 
and Spain the Life Force works in a rough-and- 
ready, slaughter-house way but in cultured Germany 
it is necessary to garnish the omelettes a little, and, 
when serving them, to use some of the religious 
phraseology to which the people are accustomed. 
Listen to Herr Hitler's speech of March, 1936 : 

My German compatriots, there is very 
much which we have to make good before our 
own history and before our Lord God. Once 
His grace was upon us ; and we were not 
worthy to keep it. Providence withdrew its 
protection from us, and our people were put 
down, put down deeper perhaps than any 
people before. In this dire need we learned to 
pray once more. We learned to respect one 
another : we believed again in the virtues of a 
people : we tried again to be better. So there 
arose a new community, and this people of 

190 



SHAW 

to-day can no more be compared with the 
people that lies behind us. 

This is the usual attempt of the New Protestant 
to draw a cheque on the Christian account by- 
presenting the credentials of" grace " and " prayer " 
and even a " Lord God." Behind it there is nothing 
but a pantheistic vagueness, a weird racial Power, 
the Life Force over again — this time wearing a 
German mask, and making ingratiating overtures 
to the Aryan race with promises of bigger and better 
omelettes. Let Russia or France or England or 
the prisoners in the internment camp stand in the 
way of this emerging God at their peril. It knows 
nothing but the German State and cares for nothing 
but its interests. 

In England the line of division between the New 
Protestantism and the Old is becoming more and 
more blurred. The new religion is making headway 
in a peacefully penetrative way and so far there 
has been no open conflict between the omelette 
makers and the traditionalists who hold so tena. 
ciously to the old beliefs. But last year the world 
was started by a spectacular challenge from the 
Life Force to the most ancient of EngHsh institutions. 
It did not look Hke that, in fact it seemed to be quite 
a romance and not at all like a threat from the new 
culture to the old ; but the Life Force has many 
masks, and always accommodates itself to national 
sentiment ; in England it is known as the Modern 
Spirit. 

191 



SHAW 

This statement may seem strange. It may be 
argued that the Russian Life Force is savage and 
the German Life Force arrogant, and that neither 
has anything in common with this well-mannered 
Modern Spirit which moves so easily in the best 
circles and is so well dressed and respectable. Of 
course it is. Where could more highly respectable 
citizens be found than the Englishmen who launched 
the evolutionary doctrines which cut at the very root 
of the beliefs on which all lasting British institutions 
are based ? Or, if nineteenth-century writers are 
supposed to be out of date, take the views of a 
modern young Englishman who is neither savage 
nor arrogant. It is just a standard sample of what 
hundreds of other honest intelligent young English- 
men with literary gifts and no observable critical 
faculty, are repeating like children repeating a 
lesson : "In the last two centuries with ever 
increasing acceleration this natural rhythm, this 
static conception of life have been breaking down. 
. . . The old agricultural-religious basis is crumbling 
away, a totally new sort of life is coming into being 
through a profound revolution, in which the World 
War was no more than a bloody and reactionary 
episode. Most of our standards and beliefs and 
institutions seem obsolete." It is impossible not to 
sympathise with him as he tries to fight his way out 
of the mess into which three centuries of twisted 
thinking have landed him, but there is no use 
pretending that this sample of the Modern Spirit 

192 



SHAW 

is anything but plain continental Life Force, or, 
if preferred, a redistillation of the Metaphysical 
Vitalism of Bdick to Methuselah. It is old-fashioned 
evolution dope not very different from that served 
out by Rosenberg and Hitler, as may be seen by 
comparing it with the quotations on pages 40 and 
190. It is the old Life Force story over again, 
warmed up with the energy of youth and crisped into 
neat paragraphs in John 0' London's Weekly (June i ith, 
1937) . The story is always the same — the old beliefs 
are no longer any use, the old law is no longer 
binding, the man of to-day is not as the man of 
yesterday, a new species is being created — and how 
can a young fellow resist when a spell-binding leader, 
or a wonderful Inner Voice, tells him that his 
children are going to be gods ? This is always the 
promise in that well-worn story, but it never comes 
off ; the children are always slaves ; and if those 
who still have faith in the old beliefs and the old 
law do not stand by them and fight for them, the 
new species of enslaved men will be created in 
England as surely as in Russia or in Germany. 

They will not notice the process. It will be 
presented to them as a wider and larger life — " life '* 
being pictured as some type of omelette attractive 
to the national palate. The Inner Light will be 
deflected and dimmed and brought down to shine 
on some scheme of social organisation, or production, 
or credit reform, or education, or armament, which, 
however stupid or unreal, can usually be made to 

193 "" 



SHAW 

look attractive for a time in that wonderful glow. 
" If our political ruin is to come it will be effected 
by ardent reformers and supported by enthusiastic 
patriots as a series of necessary steps in our progress." 
Isn't Shaw wonderful ? The Revolutionist's Handbook 
is even more up-to-date to-day than it was in 1902. 
The slaves don't know they are slaves ; in Russia 
the Sovieteers believe that they are escaping capital- 
istic exploitation, in Germany the Nazis walk with 
a firm step and their chins up. Do they feel cramped 
and confined ? Not a bit of it ; they smile at 
England's effete condition, and its fumbling efforts 
to keep the shabby idol of democracy in repair. 
And on the " concept of evolution onward and 
upward " are they not right ? By what authority 
does the Englishman, full of the Modern Spirit, 
discarding the rules he doesn't like, condemn the 
foreigner, full of the Life Force, for scrapping the 
rules which don't suit him ? On what basis do they 
settle any dispute which arises between them ? 
And what is to prevent the Life Force from tearing 
Europe to pieces to find out which of it is right ? 
But perhaps this is going a little too far. The 
Englishman is a strange person. He is fond of fancy 
beliefs in theory, but in practice he likes to stand by 
the old formulae which have stood so well by him. 
It makes him feel Modern to have some divorce 
laws on his statute book, just as it makes him feel 
broad-minded to have a few bawdy stories his 
repertoire. But when it comes to action it is 

194 



SHAW 

different. He values the formulae, even when he 
doesn't understand them, and he has Httle use for 
those who don't stand by them. Perhaps some day 
he will try to find out where the formulae came from, 
and be surprised to learn that they are " rationali- 
sations of experience firmly keyed to reality." 
And he will learn, too, that the Commonwealth 
based on big business and the big stick is a sham, 
and that the only enduring common wealth of man 
comes from common sense and common creed. 

And when that day comes ; when the pioneers of 
knowledge regain their faith and their sense of 
reality, and Science is again one ; when all that 
remains of the glamorous reHgion of Creative 
Evolution is buried under the dull respectability of a 
solidly entrenched hypothesis ; and when the Life 
Force under a new name is playing hell with a new 
generation of intelligentsia ; some day, sooner or 
later, the clarity of vision which went to the making 
of those plays and prefaces will get its due, and they 
may yet stand as a permanent record of the period 
of the evolutionary nightmare, when so many 
lived in a world of muddled emotionalism labelled 
mysticism, and self-splurges labelled creative activity; 
a world of magnificent, meaningless enthusiasms, 
and splendid, blind generosities ; a world with a 
welcome for everything but reality, and tolerance 
for everything but plain, hard thinking — the world 
of Heartbreak Bus. 



195 



CHAPTER VIII 

It will be clear now why Life Force worshippers 
are in difficulties, and why some of them are deserting 
science and others are trying to twist reahty into 
shapes which will suit their brand of modern rehgion 
or mathematics. They have various ways of dealing 
with the contradictions and confusions which came 
into the open when they turned their backs on 
Kelvin, but none has dealt with the problem so 
simply as Shaw. He adopts shock tactics which 
have so far dumbfounded his opponents. He doesn't 
dodge the contradictions ; he accepts them, and is 
not in the least afraid to contradict himself in pubHc. 
It is on just this point that his followers chide him, 
and say peevishly that he is deserting them when 
they are really deserting him. They agree to bow 
down to Irrational Power, and yet they baulk at 
the first inconsistency they meet. Inconsistencies 
are really Life Force trade marks, and the bold way 
in which they show up in Shaw's work must delight 
the heart of any reasonable man. They are like 
the anomaHes in a really good detective story — 
they all check out in the end against the central 
anomaly. The Napoleon scene in Back to Methuselah 
and the Epilogue in St, Joan, and such other pieces 

196 



SHAW 

of anti-climax are essential to the plays that contain 
them. The Life Force philosophy reduces every 
situation to absurdity, and Shaw has to abandon 
argument and let the characters behave wildly so 
that under cover of farce he may get back to sanity. 
Minor absurdities are required to balance the main 
absurdity. Millions take shelter from facts behind 
the comfortable-looking behef in eternal evolution, 
and then sheepishly refuse to recognise the curious 
consequences in which they become involved. 
Shaw gathers the oddities to himself, and with 
innocent audacity makes play out of them. He 
hugs his contradictions and magically turns them 
into an international reputation for anti-climax. 

He assumes that there is no truth and then spends 
his life hunting for it. He teaches that instit^itions 
cramp the human spirit, and then tries to build 
up institutions which will free it. He says God 
doesn't yet exist and then sends out a Black Girl to 
search for him. He says that his religion is based 
on science and then disowns science. He says he 
has found the true religion and says that there is no 
true religion. Why, only the other day, in a 
Broadcast to Schools, he scoffed at the precept that 
men should love their enemies and the next minute 
he was advising the pupils to treat those they 
disHked as they would their best friends ( The Listener^ 
June 23rd, 1937). 

It is these clashes with himself that provoke people 
into writing books about him and his views. Mrs. 

197 



SHAW 

Le Mesurier was so exasperated by The Intelligent 
Woman^s Guide to Socialism that she sat down and 
wrote The Socialist Woman's Guide to Intelligence. She 
says : 

, j^ His book has provoked me past silence. 
' K I have put before my readers as clearly as I 
% & could some of the flaws, fallacies and incon- 
sistencies with which it seems to me to bristle. 
Ul It is amazing that even an ordinarily clever 
man, much less one with a super-brain like 
^ Mr. Shaw's, should have perpetrated seriously 
some of the remarks he has allowed himself to 
make. 
She should have remembered his own warning that 
" even the cleverest man will believe what he wishes 
to believe, in spite of all the facts and all the text- 
books in the world." 

She spends 200 pages in showing up his various 
changes of front, with scrupulous quotation and 
reference, but in the end she seems to grow weary 
of the hopelessness of her task : 

If the book is picked up at random and a 
few pages read here and there, it makes stimu- 
lating and provocative reading. But when a 
serious attempt is made to follow a consistent 
argument from one chapter to another, the 
trail is blurred and all seems vague and confused. 
. . . Mr. Shaw leaps from theme to theme with 
bewildering rapidity, and one is left baffled, as 
after watching the zigzag path of flashes of 

198 



SHAW 

lightning across a dark sky, with an impression 
of dazzKng brilHance but no sense of direction. 
. . . One thing is certain, and that is, that 
whatever has been written about the book here 
or elsewhere, is, in a sense, bound to be wrong ! 
Because, however accurately Mr. Shaw may 
have been quoted and summarised, an indus- 
trious reader is sure to be able to delve into 
some recess of this mine of words and discover 
that he has also said something quite different. 
Then listen to Mr. John Strachey in the Spectator, 
November 6th, 1936 : 

Mr. Shaw is wrong. He is wrong, not 

because he disagrees with me, but because he 

disagrees with every other instructed Socialist 

and Communist who has ever written on the 

subject. Of course, Mr. Shaw was at liberty 

to redefine the words in a new sense, if he had 

explained that this was what he was doing. 

But he has never done this, and has thus caused 

very considerable confusion. 

Or take Father Leslie Walker, S.J. He has been 

reading The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search 

for God, and Shaw's jumpiness about words bothers 

him. He finds that " science," for instance, has two 

meanings : 

science 1 = a spring of purest water, 
sciences = a source polluted and dangerous, 
and, like Mrs. Le Mesurier, he is a Httle dazed to 
find an eminent man contradicting himself with such 

199 



SHAW 

energy. He is puzzled and as he says in his Prologue 
to The Return to God : 

It is in part because I am puzzled that 

I am going to write this book. I am sceptical 

about the fresh-water supply because, in the 

course of his *' Adventures," Mr. Shaw seems to 

have done not a little to poison the wells of 

Science from which he would have me draw. 

He finds that Shaw is facing both ways, and he 

seems to think the position unnatural. But what 

other position is possible for Life Force prophets ? 

They must always be travelling north and south, 

always setting out as they are arriving, always 

gazing at their own backs as they progress round and 

round the fatal enclosure : 

fA ^ 

z _ 

" z 

200 



S H A W 

Shaw's contradictions turn about everything, but 
mainly about Christianity and sex. He is for ever 
dealing with them, for ever turning them upside 
down and inside out — searching. He seems to say 
at once about each that it is the only thing worth 
considering, and that it is an absurdity ; he wants 
them and he wants them wiped out ; they are 
simultaneously good and evil. A mother with her 
baby is the most important thing in the world, and 
love is an illusion to be laughed off the face of the 
earth : " When we want to read of the deeds that 
are done for love, whither do we turn? To the 
murder column ; and there we are rarely disap- 
pointed " {Prefaces^ p. 715). 

Contradictory urges make him careless. Or 
rather — ^for he is never careless — they dull his vision. 
There is no man more scrupulous for the integrity 
of the written word, yet when he wishes to show that 
Christ and St. Paul were at odds with one another 
about marriage, he suddenly begins to read the Bible 
so blindly that he attributes St. Paul's statements 
(i Cor. vii) to Jesus, and thus makes his argument 
bite its own head off {Prefaces, p. 561) . Then, again, 
when he wants to scoff at love, he looks to La Roche- 
foucauld for support, and quotes him as saying : 
" very few people would ever imagine themselves 
in love if they had never read anything about it " 
{Prefaces, p. 108), and is so pleased with the mis- 
quotation that he stores it away and repeats seven 
years later : " Love did nothing but prove the 

201 



SHAW 

soundness of La Rochefoucauld's saying that very 
few people would fall in love if they never read 
anything about it " {Prefaces, p. 380). O blind and 
perverse ! How could anyone believe for a minute 
that a Frenchman would say anything so idiotic, 
and how did Shaw come to offer such strange and 
heavy-handed renderings of the delicious "II y a 
des gens qui n'auroient jamais ete amoureux s'ils 
n'avoient jamais entendu parler de I'amour ? " 

The treatment of love in The Adventures of the Black 
Girl is even stranger and more perverse. On p. 7 
the woman missionary is described as an odd little 
body who : 

had settled down in the African forest to teach 
little African children to lovcj Christ and adore 
the Gross. She was a born apostle of love 2. 
At school she had adored one or other of her 
teachers with an idolatry that was proof against 
all snubbing, but had never cared much for 
girls of her own age and standing. At eighteen 
she began falling in love 3 with earnest clergymen, 
and actually became engaged to six of them in 
succession. But when it came to the point, she 
always broke it off; for these love 4 affairs, full 
at first of ecstatic happiness and hope, somehow 
became unreal and eluded her in the end. 
The clergymen, thus suddenly and unac- 
countably disengaged, did not always conceal 
their sense of relief and escape, as if they too 
had discovered that the dream was only a 

202 



SHAW 

dream, or a sort of metaphor by which they 
had striven to express the real thing, but not 
itself the real thing. 

One of the jilted, however, committed 
suicide ; and this tragedy gave her an extra- 
ordinary joy. It seemed to take her from a 
fool's paradise of false happiness into a real 
region in which intense suffering became 
transcendent rapture. 
Here are the clues for this crazy cross-word puzzle : 

Lovcj = Charity. 

LovCg = I, 3 or 4. 

LovCg = Sentimentalising. 

Love4 = Perverted. 

It is a strange, frothy, clever, repellent opening, and 
it seems to have little to do with what follows. But 
when Christ is brought on the scene it will be found 
that the motif is repeated and developed. On p. 29 
the Black Girl meets " the conjuror," who is repre- 
sented as a feeble, well-meaning, touchy, ricky-ticky- 
tavy young man. The Black Girl, full up with 
Man and Superman, hardly gives him a chance to get 
in a word edgeways : 

" I've seen worse kings," said the black girl, 
" so you need not blush. Well, let you be 
King Solomon, and let me be the Queen of 
Sheba, same as in the Bible. I come to you 
and say that I love you. That means I have 
come to take possession of you. I come with 

203 



SHAW 

the love of a lioness and eat you up, and make 
you a part of myself. From this time, you will 
have to think, not of what pleases you, but of 
what pleases me. I will stand between you 
and yourself, between you and God. Is not 
that a terrible tyranny? Love is a devouring 
thing. Can you imagine heaven with love in it? '* 
*' In my heaven there is nothing else. What 
else is heaven but love ? " said the conjuror 
boldly but uncomfortably. 

" It is glory. It is the home of God and 

his thoughts ; there is no biUing and cooing 

there, no clinging to one another like a tick 

to a sheep. The missionary, my teacher, talks 

of love ; but she has run away from all her 

lovers to do God's work. The whites turn their 

eyes away from me lest they should love me. 

There are companies of men and women who 

have devoted themselves to God's work, but 

though they call themselves brotherhoods and 

sisterhoods, they do not speak to one another. " 

It all gives the curious fleeting impression of love 

being pursued by distortion and hatred, and yet 

there is also in it that equally curious redeeming 

childish quahty which persists through all Shaw's 

writings. " There's * glory ' for you," says he, just 

like Humpty-Dumpty : 

"But 'glory' doesn't mean, *a nice knock- 
down argument,' " Alice objected. 
*'When / use a word," Humpty Dumpty 

204 



SHAW 

said in rather a scornful tone, '* it means just 
what I choose it to mean, neither more nor 
less." 

" The question is," said Alice, ** whether you 
can make words mean so many different things. " 
Shaw himself was apparently rather puzzled by 
the Adventures of the Black Girl. He tells his readers 
on p. 59 that he was inspired to write it — that he 
was, in fact, only a penholder — and he warns them 
that it may be all nonsense : 

I know by observation and introspection 

that the instrument on which the inspiring 

force plays may be a very faulty one, and may 

even end like Bunyan in The Holy War, by 

making the most ridiculous nonsense of his 

message. 

But he seems to have no doubt that it is the wish of 

the Life Force that belief and trust in Christ be 

wiped out so that the modern State may come into 

its own, for his last words on p. 74 are : 

When the question of the existence of Noah's 
idol is raised on the point, vital to high civilisa- 
tion, whether our children shall continue to 
be brought up to worship it and compound for 
their sins by sacrificing to it, or, more cheaply, 
by sheltering themselves behind another's sacri- 
fice to it, then whoever hesitates to bring down 
the knobkerry with might and main is 
ludicrously unfit to have any part in the govern- 
ment of a modern State. The importance of a 

205 



S H A W 

message to that effect at the present world 
crisis is probably at the bottom of my curious 
and sudden inspiration to write this tale 
instead of cumbering theatrical literature with 
another stage comedy. 
This nightmare view of Christian belief may 
offend the orthodox, but they must remember that 
Shaw has been working all his Hfe on inside informa- 
tion about Christianity gathered prior to 1866, and 
that his doctrinal age is probably about nine years. 
The Sunday-school teaching of that period appears to 
have been very crude— he was taught, for instance, 
that all Catholics would sizzle in hell — and it is 
evident from the Adventures that many early mis- 
conceptions were still flourishing in 1932. 

It will be hard for many to beHeve that the author 
of St. Joan remained all his Hfe so immature and 
uninformed about the essentials of Christian doctrine 
— but it is a fact — or rather it is an hypothesis which 
fits the facts. This does not mean that it will fit 
all the Shaws. For this book is not an attempt to 
dissect a real man, but an effort to find some key 
to a set of writings. It makes no pretence to offer 
a picture of the real Shaw, still less explain him. 
A botanist doesn't explain a tree — in fact, when he 
is finished with the root and the sap and the leaves, 
there is precious little tree left. Still, the leaves are 
interesting and have a story to tell. Shaw's works 
must stand by themselves if they are to stand at all, 
and whatever pitfalls lie in the way of an attempt to 

206 



SHAW 

see them and their writer as they may be seen in 
A,D. 2000, or even A.D. 2,000,000, must be gaily faced. 
Let there be no bones about this either ; let nothing 
be lacking that can add to the defiance of this 
challenge — of behef in a perfectly reliable God and 
eternal order — to the Shavian creed of eternal con- 
fusion, with its morahty perpetually in the melting- 
pot. All that matters, in what is written here, might 
be written any time by anyone with a set of Shaw's 
works, a few standard history books, a real world, 
and some common sense, at his disposal. There is 
no appeal to anything but the evidence which they 
offer, and there is no need to turn back when the 
evidence piles up overv/helmingly to show that those 
works were produced by a man behind whose beard 
and bushy eyebrows a child was hiding. 

There is a fiesh-and-blood Shaw who goes about 
the world radiating such bracing kindliness that the 
magazines and newspapers teem with the pleasant, 
if rather puzzled, references of those who have made 
personal contact with him. Whether the Shaw who 
wrote the books is the same Shaw or not, does not 
matter here ; the whole point is, that they were 
written by two different persons. It is convenient — 
saving their presence — to call them George and 
Bernard, and to visualise one of them as a prophet- 
at-a-loss, rather ignored by the general public (who 
ever heard of George Shaw ?) and to think of the other 
as that Peter Pan, that eternal youth, that popular 
favourite whose name is a household word. 

207 



SHAW 



When these two are at work together, it is very 
trying. In the second act of Heartbreak House they 
pose, for a few pages, as Captain Shotover and EUie. 
To make it hard, Bernard is dressed up as " an 
ancient but still hardy man with an immense white 
beard, in a reefer jacket," but he has " a whistle 
hanging from his neck," which is just right. George 
comes on demurely as " a pretty girl, slender, fair, 
and intelHgent looking." To make matters worse, 
they are incHned to swop places as that earnest 
dialogue proceeds. It is all rather hard on people 
who are going to the theatre for a night's relaxation ; 
but after all, isn't there the burglar and Mrs. 
Hushabye, and the rum-drinking — oh, there's lots 
of drollery in that play. 

Bernard has wonderful vision ; he is a natural 
observer who gathers material as he goes, and hands 
it to George to sort out. In a way this is hard on 
George, for he hasn't the head for such a job ; 
but he is a great worker, and, under Life Force 
management, he has arranged the material so that 
Creative Evolution may be staged as the religion of 
the twentieth century. The curious thing is that 
Bernard sometimes comes out in front to take a look 
at George's God and says that he doesn't think much 
of either of them. He and Ann agreed that George 
was just " Talking " — talking through his hat — that 
time he got himself up as Jack Tanner. 

Another way of putting all this is to say that 
George does not think in abstract terms. Instead 

208 



SHAW 

of a sequence of thought, he offers a series of vivid 
pictures, each with a high emotional content and 
something in common with the one which went 
before it. He starts off with his conclusion and then 
goes on in lively fashion to personal applications and 
particular instances, all bearing progressively on 
what he wants his readers to believe. The selection 
is kaleidoscopic and the presentation marvellous ; 
it is word pageantry as gorgeous as a royal procession, 
and as hypnotic. It makes some people worshipful, 
others wild, and a few a little impatient that a man 
should take so long to grow up. The process is 
applied to all topics like a formula, and shows little 
change with passing years : 

1903 •• 

But ordinary men cannot produce really 
impressive art-works. Those who can are men 
of genius : that is, men selected by Nature to 
carry on the work of building up an intellectual 
consciousness of her own instinctive purpose. 
Accordingly, we observe in the man of genius 
all the unscrupulousness and all the " self- 
sacrifice " (the two things are the same) 01 
Woman. He will risk the stake and the cross , 
starve, when necessary, in a garret all his life ; 
study women and live on their work and care 
as Darwin studied worms and lived upon sheep ; 
work his nerves into rags without payment, a 
sublime altruist in his disregard of him.self, an 
atrocious egoist in his disregard of others. Here 
s. 209 ^ 



SHAW 

Woman meets a purpose as impersonal and 
irresistible as her own ; and the clash is some- 
times tragic. {Prefaces, p. 157.) 

1908 : 

There is no subject on which more 
dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than 
marriage. If the mischief stopped at talking 
and thinking it would be bad enough ; but it 
goes further into disastrous anarchical action. 
Because our marriage law is inhuman and 
unreasonable to the point of downright abomina- 
tion, the bolder and more rebelHous spirits form 
illicit unions, defiantly sending cards round to 
their friends announcing what they have done. 
Young women come to me and ask me whether 
I think they ought to consent to marry the man 
they have decided to live with ; and they are 
perplexed and astonished when I, who am 
supposed (heaven knows why !) to have the 
most advanced views attainable on the subject, 
urge them on no account to compromise 
themselves without the security of an authentic 
wedding ring. [Prefaces, p. i .) 

1910 : 

Childhood is a stage in the process of that 
continual remanufacture of the Life Stuff by 
which the human race is perpetuated. The 
Life Force either will not or cannot achieve 
immortahty except in very low organisms : 
indeed it is by no means ascertained that even 

2J0 



SHAW 

the amoeba is immortal. Human beings visibly 
wear out, though they last longer than their 
friends the dogs. Turtles, parrots, and elephants 
are believed to be capable of outliving the 
memory of the oldest human inhabitant. But the 
fact that new ones are born conclusively proves 
that they are not immortal. {Prefaces^ p. 45.) 
1916 : 

Setting aside the huge mass of inculcated 
Christ-worship which has no real significance 
because it has no intelligence, there is, among 
people who are really free to think for them- 
selves on the subject, a great deal of hearty 
dislike of Jesus and of contempt for his failure 
to save himself and overcome his enemies by 
personal bravery and cunning as Mahomet did. 
I have heard this feeling expressed far more 
impatiently by persons brought up in England 
as Christians than by Mahometans, who are, 
like their prophet, very civil to Jesus, and allow 
him a place in their esteem and veneration at 
least as high as we accord to John the Baptist. 
{Prefaces^ p. 526.) 

Let us be clear about the meaning of the 
terms. A genius is a person, who, seeing farther 
and probing deeper than other people, has a 
different set of ethical valuations from theirs, 
and has energy enough to give effect to this 
extra vision and its valuations in whatever 
manner best suits his or her specific talents. 

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SHAW 

A saint is one who having practised heroic 
virtues, and enjoyed revelations or powers which 
the Church classes technically as supernatural, 
is eligible for canonisation. If a historian is 
Anti-Feminist, and does not believe women to 
be capable of genius in the traditional masculine 
departments, he will never make anything of 
Joan, whose genius was turned to practical 
account mainly in soldiering and politics. 
{Prefaces, p. 584.) 

1933 .• 

All modern progressive and revolutionary 
movements are at bottom attacks on private 
property. A Chancellor of the Exchequer 
apologising for an increase in the surtax, a 
Fascist dictator organising a Corporate State, 
a Soviet Commissar ejecting a kulak and 
adding his acres to a collective farm, are all 
running the same race, though all of them 
except the Commissar may be extremely 
reluctant to win it. For in the long run the 
power to exterminate is too grave to be left in 
any hands but those of a thoroughly Communist 
Government responsible to the whole com- 
munity. The landlord with his writ of eject- 
ment and the employer with his sack must 
finally go the way of the nobleman with his 
sword and his benefit of clergy, and of Hannibal 
Chollop with his bowie knife and pistol. 
{Prefaces, p. 355.) 

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SHAW 

Some people, like Mrs. Le Mesurier, Mr. Strachey, 
and Father Walker, hold that thinking should be 
done with the intellect, but these passages and 
thousands of others like them show what colourful 
work can be done by the emotions. Shaw's thought 
is the swift-flowing, impulsive imagery-thinking of 
a child. The Fabian Essay on Rent is full of it. 
It is a shocking thing to have to say, but it really 
must be said — Shaw does not understand economic 
science. He knows all about rent. Two hundred 
years of Kilkenny, topped off with four years of a 
Molesworth Street estate oflSce, taught him the way 
of a man with land. He got his theories of value 
from books, but he learnt landlordism in a practical 
school. In nineteenth-century England, land- 
lordism and the structure of society were so closely 
linked that it was easy to mistake one for the other. 
It was natural for Shaw, pursuing his empirical way, 
to see everything in terms of rent, and to ignore the 
credit system ; for rent comes in chunks that can 
be counted, whereas credit is an intangible element 
too evasive for pictorial methods of thinking ; it is 
like value which also evaded him as it dived 
frantically into a maze of differentials ; but 
what he loses on the calculus he makes up in 
careful observation among the common swings and 
roundabouts. Just when George's incompetent 
theorising threatens to have serious consequences, 
Bernard comes along and puts in a brass tack. 

Neither of them understands economic science. 

213 



SHAW 

But is there such a science, and do the economists 
themselves understand it ? All engineers agree on 
fundamental questions like " What is a horse-power, 
and how does it exchange for calories ? " and so 
they can get ahead ; but the economists have not 
yet decided the question : " What is a man's soul 
and how much is it worth ? " Some of them 
are haggling over it, and some cannot even see that 
the science of economics does not emerge till that 
value is fixed in hard cash, or commodities, or at 
least in terms of a printed card. The Marxians agree 
that the answer is all in terms of material needs and 
satisfactions ; and so long as that answer holds, their 
science will hold. If man consents to enslavement, 
problems of value vanish and economics becomes a 
stable science with firm unchanging laws. George, 
whose taste runs rather to libraries, uses the 
Marxian answer as a foundation stone, but Bernard 
makes all his Communistic friends uneasy by throw- 
ing back his young head and laughing at it. 

It is perfectly clear that each of them is trying 
hard to be faithful to his tutors. They had no 
ordinary education : George was brought up by the 
Kilkenny Shaws and John Vandaleur Lee, till he 
got into the hands of Helmholtz, Tyndall, Rousseau 
and Marx ; Bernard started with his mother and 
an Irish Catholic nurse, and then went on to Mozart, 
Shakespeare, Michael Angelo and Dickens ; both 
of them sat at the feet of Shelley and Wagner. 
How can any of us compete with such a combina- 

214 



SHAW 

tion ? We can only watch it competing with itself 
in that conflict called his works, that record of his 
researches which is such a complete guide to the 
process by which the idea of Propagation of Species, 
made dogma, leads men (even men like Marx and 
Buckle and Freud) into the darkness and enchains 
their minds. 

George is a slave. He bows down to that dogma 
and adores before the Life Force ; he works for it, or 
perhaps it would be truer to say it works through 
him. Listen to his surrender : 

r perceive the value and truth of 

Calvin's conviction that once a man is 

born, it is too late to 

him ; you may " educate 

character " until you are black in the 

FACE ; HE IS PREDESTINATE AND HIS SOUL CANNOT 
BE CHANGED ANY MORE THAN A SILK PURSE CAN 
BE CHANGED INTO A SOW's EAR. (AugUSt, I909, 

Pen Portraits and Reviews, p. 91.) 
This is the burden of his message and the core of 
his teaching. The Life Force surges bhndly, tapping 
out its slaves by the million : tap tap . . Rich man, 
Poor man . . tap tap tap . . . Tinker, Tailor, 
Thief . . . tap tap tap tap. . . . Sinner, Saint, 
Hero, Hussy .... and so ad infinitum. 

Bernard is free. He values the gift of freedom and 
power of choice above all things and rejects that 
accursed doctrine. It has tried in a hundred 
disguises over nearly as many years to entrap him, 

215 



SHAW 

but he always eludes it. It presents itself as the garb 
of maturity, but if the acceptance of that is the 
price of growing up, he prefers to remain free and a 
child for ever. This is why he had led George such 
a dance ; this is why he has so annoyed and bewil- 
dered his votaries ; this is why all the rest of us 
love him. 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

I am deeply indebted to the following books : 

Candlelight Attic, by Cecily Hallack. 

St, Catherine, by AHce Curtayne. 

Plays and Prefaces, by Bernard Shaw. 

Shaw, Playboy and Prophet, by Archibald 
Henderson. 

Progress and Religion, by Christopher Dawson. 

The Nature of Belief , by U. C. D'Arcy, S.J. 
and also to Father Stephen Brown, S.J., to Father 
Aegidius Dovlan, O.P., and to Mr. F. J. Sheed. 

J. P. HACKETT. 

Dublin, July 1937 



216 



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